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HIPPOCRATIC DATA SHARING IN E-GOVERNMENT
SPACE WITH CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
Yoganand Aiyadurai
April, 2015
ii
HIPPOCRATIC DATA SHARING IN E-GOVERNMENT
SPACE WITH CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
By
Yoganand Aiyadurai
(21347510)
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree
MAGISTER TECHNOLOGIAE: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
In the
DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
FACULTY OF ACCOUNTING AND INFORMATICS
DURBAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Supervisors:
Prof. Dr. OLUGBARA O. OLUDAYO
Prof. Dr. THIRUTHLALL NEPAL
April 2015
iii
Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my dear sweet little angel:
Tanvi Aiyadurai
She is my motivation, inspiration and the liveliness.
iv
Acknowledgement
To my supervisors Professor Dr. O. O Olugbara and Professor Dr. Thiruthlall Nepal, I have
been eternally grateful for your leadership, patience, critique, motivation and valuable inputs
in my research work. I appreciate your expertise, wisdom, cheerful encouragement and vast
research knowledge that came in handy towards shaping this research. I am always motivated
with your positive energy.
To my family for tolerating me and supporting me during the course of study.
v
Declaration
I, Yoganand Aiyadurai, hereby declare that the dissertation submitted for the degree Master in
Information Technology at the Department of Information Technology, Faculty of
Information Technology at Durban University of Technology, Durban South Africa, is my
original work and has not been previously submitted to any other institution of higher learning
by other persons or myself. I further declare that all the sources cited and quoted have been
acknowledged accordingly by means of a list of references and footnotes.
Student:
_____________________ ____________
Yoganand Aiyadurai Date
Approval for final submission
Supervisor:
_____________________ ____________
Prof. O.O. Olugbara Date
Co-Supervisor:
_____________________ ____________
Prof. T. Nepal Date
vi
Table of Contents
Dedication ................................................................................................................................. iii
Acknowledgement ..................................................................................................................... iv
Declaration ................................................................................................................................. v
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... vi
List of Tables ............................................................................................................................. ix
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ x
List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. xi
Artefacts ................................................................................................................................... xii
Abstract ................................................................................................................................... xiii
CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1
1.1 Problem Statement ............................................................................................................ 5
1.2 Research Question ............................................................................................................ 6
1.3 Research Goal and Objectives .......................................................................................... 7
1.4 Research Methods............................................................................................................. 7
1.5 Study Scope ...................................................................................................................... 8
1.6 Contributions .................................................................................................................... 9
1.7 Synopsis .......................................................................................................................... 10
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE OVERVIEW ............................................................................ 11
2.1 Definition of e-Government ........................................................................................... 11
2.2 Opportunities for E-government ..................................................................................... 12
2.3 Challenges of E-government .......................................................................................... 15
2.4 Growth Stages of E-government .................................................................................... 17
2.4.1 Inception Stage ......................................................................................................... 17
2.4.2 Maturity Stage .......................................................................................................... 18
2.4.3 Innovation Stage ...................................................................................................... 19
2.5 State of e-Government Development in Developing Countries ..................................... 21
2.6 Rationale for E-Government Data Sharing .................................................................... 29
2.7 Barriers to E-Government Data Sharing ........................................................................ 30
2.8 E-Government Data Sharing Models ............................................................................. 32
2.9 Literature Summary ........................................................................................................ 33
CHAPTER 3 : STUDY METHODOLOGY ............................................................................ 36
vii
3.1 Design Science Research ................................................................................................ 36
3.2 Hippocratic Data Sharing ............................................................................................... 40
3.3 Modelling of Data Sharing Gateway System ................................................................. 42
3.3.1 Objectives of the DIG Framework ........................................................................... 43
3.3.2 High Level DIG Architecture .................................................................................. 44
3.3.3 Managing Hippocratic Data Contract Policy ........................................................... 45
3.3.3.1 Manage Users ........................................................................................................ 46
3.3.3.2 Mange Departments .............................................................................................. 47
3.3.3.3 Manage Database Connections ............................................................................. 47
3.3.3.4 Manage Publications ............................................................................................. 48
3.3.3.5 Manage Data Contracts ......................................................................................... 48
3.3.3.6 Manage Department Data Contract Access .......................................................... 49
3.3.3.7 Manage Audit Logs ............................................................................................... 49
3.3.3.8 Approve a Data Contract ...................................................................................... 50
3.3.4 Sequence Diagram for Inter Department Communication ...................................... 50
3.3.4.1 Current Scenario ................................................................................................... 50
3.3.4.2 Future Scenario with DIG system ......................................................................... 52
3.3.5 Meta Model Class Diagram for the DIG System ..................................................... 53
3.3.6 Use Case Diagram for the DIG System ................................................................... 54
3.3.7 Hippocratic Model on which the research is premised ............................................ 56
3.3.8 Prototype Evaluation ................................................................................................ 57
3.3.9 Dissemination .......................................................................................................... 57
3.9 Limitations ...................................................................................................................... 57
CHAPTER 4: PROTOTYPE SYSTEM EVALUATION ........................................................ 59
4.1 Prototype Implementation .............................................................................................. 59
4.2 Evaluation Components .................................................................................................. 61
4.2.1 Manage Login .............................................................................................................. 63
4.2.2 Define Department ...................................................................................................... 65
4.2.3 Manage Connection String .......................................................................................... 69
4.2.4 Authorise Contract ....................................................................................................... 70
4.2.5 View Audit Log ........................................................................................................... 71
4.3 Evaluation Constructs ..................................................................................................... 73
4.4 System Evaluators .......................................................................................................... 74
4.5 Evaluation Procedure ...................................................................................................... 75
4.6 Evaluation Results .......................................................................................................... 77
viii
CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS ............................................................ 80
5.1 Summary of the Study .................................................................................................... 80
5.2 Benefits of Data Integration Gateway ............................................................................ 82
5.3 Future Work .................................................................................................................... 85
5.4 Concluding Remarks ...................................................................................................... 86
REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 88
ix
List of Tables
Table 2.1: Barriers to inter-organisational data sharing ............................................... 31
Table 2.2: Summary of Related e-Government Model ................................................ 35
Table 3.1: Role and responsibility of the users ............................................................ 55
Table 3.2: Functions needed for the prototype development ....................................... 56
Table 4.1: DIG system evaluation constructs and statements ...................................... 74
Table 4.2: Distribution of system evaluators ............................................................... 75
Table 4.3: Evaluation Methods Used in this Study ...................................................... 76
x
List of Figures
Figure 2.1: E-Government reforms at the inception stage (1990-99) .......................... 18
Figure 2.2: E-Government reforms at the maturity stage (2000-2010) ........................ 19
Figure 2.3: E-Government reforms at the innovation stage (2011-2020) .................... 20
Figure 2.4: Waseda University E-Government world ranking 2013 (de Jager and van
Reijswoud 2008) ...................................................................................................... 23
Figure 2.5: Overlapping of e-governance .................................................................... 24
Figure 2.6: Human activity infrastructure of e-government model ............................. 25
Figure 2.7: E-government maturity model ................................................................... 26
Figure 2.8: Model of e-inclusion .................................................................................. 27
Figure 2.9: Collaborative e-government forces ............................................................ 28
Figure 3.1 Design science research cycle (Vaishnavi et al. 2004) ............................... 38
Figure 3.2: DIG system architecture ............................................................................ 45
Figure 3.3: UML sequence diagram for inter department communication current
scenario .................................................................................................................... 52
Figure 3.4: UML sequence diagram for inter department communication with DIG .. 53
Figure 3.5: Data sharing gateway – UML meta model ................................................ 54
Figure 3.6: Use case diagram for the DIG system ....................................................... 55
Figure 4.1: “DIG Login” screen ................................................................................... 63
Figure 4.2: “Manage Login” screen ............................................................................. 64
Figure 4.3: “Create Login” or “Edit Login” screens are similar to each other ............ 64
Figure 4.4: “Define Department” screen ...................................................................... 65
Figure 4.5: “Create Department” screen ...................................................................... 66
Figure 4.6: “Create Publication” contract screen ......................................................... 67
Figure 4.7: “View Data Contract Information” screen ................................................ 68
Figure 4.8: “View Data” screen ................................................................................... 69
Figure 4.9: “Manage Connection String” screen ......................................................... 70
Figure 4.10: “Create Connection String” screen .......................................................... 70
Figure 4.11: “Authorise Contract” screen .................................................................... 71
Figure 4.12: “View Audit Log” screen ........................................................................ 72
Figure 4.13: “Search Audit Log” screen ...................................................................... 72
Figure 4.14: Mean of user interaction and system usability measurements ................. 78
Figure 4.15: DIG application evaluation using unit tests with passed test case ........... 79
xi
List of Abbreviations
B2G Business-to-government
DBA Database Administrator
DIG Data Integration Gateway
DHA Department of Home Affairs
DSR Design science research
DUT Durban University of Technology
G2B Government-to-Business
G2C Government-to-Citizens
G2E Government-to-Employee
G2G Government-to-Government
G2N Government-to-Non-profit
G2P Government-to-Public
HDBs Hippocratic databases
ICT Information communication technology
IDABC
Interoperable Delivery of European e-Government Services to public
Administrations, Businesses and Citizens
IDC Industrial Development Corporation
IIS Internet Information Server
IOW Inter organizational workflow
N2G Non-profit-to-Government
OCL Object constraint language
SAPS South Africa Police Service
SDSR Soft design science research
SQL CE Structured Query Language Compact Edition
TCP Transmission Control Protocol
UML Unified modelling language
WAS Windows Application Service
WCF Windows Communication Foundation
xii
Artefacts
The Data Integration Gateway (DIG) system prototype is deployed on the web for evaluation
and demo purposes. This prototype is awaiting for patent from Durban University of
Technology (DUT). The URL details and the login details are provided below:
DIG system URL: http://yogiaiyadurai-001-site1/
Login details
a) Global Admin (Role: Data contract authorizer)
User name - globaladmin
Password - Globaladmin15$%
b) Department Admin (Role: Data contract manager)
Metro department admin
User name - metroadmin
Password - Metroadmin15$%
SAPS department admin
User name - sapsadmin
Password - Sapsadmin15$%
Home Affairs department admin
User name – homeaffairsadmin
Password - Homeaffairsadmin15$%
c) Department User (Role: Data contract visualizer)
User name – deptuser1
Password – Deptuser115$%
xiii
Abstract
The research reported in this dissertation focuses on seamless data sharing in e-government
space because of the intrinsic complexity, disparity and heterogeneity of government
information systems as well as the need to improve government service delivery. The often
observed bureaucracy in government processes, especially when verifying information,
coupled with the high interdependency of government departments and diversity in
government operations has made it difficult to improve government service delivery
efficiency. These challenges raise the need to find better ways to seamlessly share data
between government to citizens, government to businesses, government to suppliers and
government to public institutions. Obviously, efficient automatic data sharing is an important
phenomenon that contributes to improvements in communication, collaboration, interaction
and efficiency in the service delivery process because it reduces information verification time
and improves reliability of information.
The general applications of data sharing systems become perceptible in institutions
such as banks and government establishments where information verification is highly
necessary in the process of service delivery. Data sharing usually occurs between a data
holder and a data requester when copies of authorized data are transported from the source
databases to the requester. This data sharing process should guarantee a high level of privacy
because of the confidential nature of certain data. A data integration gateway (DIG) is being
proposed in this research as a methodological solution to seamlessly share data in e-
government space, using Hippocratic database principles to enforce data privacy.
The DIG system is a centralized web application that utilizes a lightweight database
within the government data centre to hold information on data contracts, data sources,
connection strings and data destinations. The data sharing policies are stated as contracts and
once indentures on how to share data are established between different data publishers, it is
possible to ensure a seamless integration of data from different sources using the DIG
application being proposed in this dissertation. The application is malleable to support the
sharing of publisher data that are stored in any kind of database. The proposed DIG
application promises to reduce costs of system maintenance and improve service delivery
efficiency without any change to the existing hardware infrastructure and information systems
residing within different government departments.
1
CHAPTER 1 : INTRODUCTION
Data sharing is an important phenomenon that allows for disparate and heterogeneous
information systems to effectively communicate supported by seamless transportation of data
from sources to the target destinations. It is the ability to distribute data resources that are
stored in one or more disparate data servers in the network to multiple applications or users.
Data sharing is a key concept in ‘open government’ initiatives. Such initiatives inspire
governments to share their data thereby forming a shared environment and encouraging
innovation regarding provision of improved services for citizens and society. An effective
form of data sharing can transform government into a smart-government. The industrial
development corporation (IDC) defines smart government as “the implementation of a set of
business processes and underlying information communication technology capabilities that
enable a seamless flow of information (data) across government agencies and programmes to
become intuitive in providing high quality of information and citizen services, increase
efficiency, transparency and openness across all government programmes and activity
domains” (Rubel 2011). The first important mission for the success of smart government is to
share government data with citizens, which is called government-to-citizens (G2C) sharing
(Choi et al. 2013). In general, governments collect huge volumes of data items such as
demographic, asset ownership, criminality, health, financial and traffic data and store them in
their information systems or store them as manual documents, depending on the situation.
The sharing of government collected data in an unprecedented manner may create innovative
products and services for citizens, businesses and governments (Choi et al. 2013).
Automatic sharing of data is particularly useful in a complex e-government space to
improve efficiency of service delivery. In this dissertation, an e-government space is defined
as a multidimensional virtual ecosystem of data sources, information systems, data providers
and data consumers where different dimensions represent the diverse automated resources
and functions of government. An example of an e-government space is the virtual space of
automated resources and functions of two government departments, South Africa Police
Service (SAPS) and Department of Home Affairs (DHA). The virtual space spanned by
SAPS and DHA completely describes the automated resources and functions of these two
departments together with how these functions and resources are shared in relation to external
agencies. Data sharing places a huge demand on data security or privacy because of the
confidentiality of different kinds of data that are kept in such a virtual space.
2
There are many existing techniques for ensuring that data are kept secure, prominent
amongst these being cryptography and secured network channels. While these traditional
techniques provide acceptable solutions to data security problems to a certain extent, they can
still be compromised because of the impossibility to achieve 100% security in real life. In
addition, these techniques provide little confidence to data providers because resource
providers are not directly involved in the data security process. It is prudent therefore to
provide several layers of data security to increase the confidence level of data publishers or
owners in e-government space.
In recent times, researchers have proposed a set of Hippocratic database principles as
a way of securely managing disclosure of privately owned data (Massacci et al. 2006). The
attractiveness of the Hippocratic database principles is that they guarantee respect of privacy
principles in data management. This research reports on a Data Integration Gateway (DIG)
which is based on Hippocratic database principles to improve and speed up the delivery
process of government services through seamless sharing of data. The idea of a DIG as
proposed in this research is motivated by the elementary principles of the Hippocratic oath
that apply to information systems to afford data security by applying privacy and
confidentiality principles (Agrawal et al. 2002; Azemovic 2012). The very factor that makes
the internet a powerful medium for seamless sharing of personal data has also led to criticism
over the loss and violation of privacy (Kim and Kim 2010). The research community must
therefore be concerned with the great challenges of open data, big data, and the reliability of
stored data and fool proof computing when designing new information systems. There must
be no compromise with the security and privacy features of those information systems. The
security and privacy must also be simple enough so that they are easily understood by an
average user (Bernat et al. 2003). The maintenance of privacy controls becomes more
complex across diverse distributed and heterogeneous systems that differ in operating
systems and requirements where data security policy is often overlooked (Skinner and Chang
2006).
The focus of this research is on using the Hippocratic database principles to achieve
seamless data sharing within the e-government space. The rapid advancement in information
technology directed to the incorporation of computers with telecommunication gadgets in
government institutions and private sectors has made it possible to improve the government
service delivery process. Governments across the world have shown a willingness to reap the
power of information communication technology for providing improved service delivery
and to improve the effectiveness, responsibility and ease of service access along with
3
increased openness and transparency in government actions (Choudrie et al. 2005). The use
of information communication technology, particularly the internet, to transform government
processes is often called e-government, which is a multi-faced and varied field that must be
carefully managed and supported by the government. The field of e-government is a concept
that is ever changing and improving with the availability of new technologies and emerging
challenges. Taking into cognisance the variety of solutions needed to implement seamless e-
government, a general solution to fulfil all the requirements of seamless e-government and to
come up with a common work process is very difficult to achieve. The essential elements of
e-government are the following (Heeks 2001; Mkude et al. 2014; Grundén 2012):
a) E-administration – this solution is for refining the existing process or methods in
government that can lead to reduced costs, improved performance and empowerment
of strategic decision making.
b) E-service – this solution is for linking the government with the citizens, wherein the
government consults with the citizens to support democracy and help improve the
efficiency of public services.
c) E-society – all the entities within society such as business, citizens, private sectors and
communities are connected together to work better outside the limitations of the
government.
The accomplishments in e-government can be measured on the basis of effective
collaboration between different sectors of government departments, businesses and citizens
(Jaeger and Thompson 2003). The different types of collaborations often associated with e-
government that can bring about significant opportunities to governments, citizens,
businesses, employees, non-profit organisations and social-political organisations are the
following (Yanqing 2011):
a) Government-to-government (G2G) – this involves communication and internal
exchange of resources between government departments through an online platform
to create an obvious impact on efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery.
b) Government-to-business (G2B) – this involves the electronic transaction activities
such as e-procurement of goods and services between government departments and
businesses.
c) Business-to-government (B2G) – this involves online transaction initiatives such as e-
procurement and development of an e-marketplace for government purchases and
procurement of tenders for sales of goods and services.
4
d) Government-to-citizen (G2C) – this involves offering public services online through
electronic service delivery to increase the accessibility of citizens who consume those
government services.
e) Citizen-to-government (C2G) – this involves online business transactions such as tax
payment, issuance of certificates, renewing of motor driving license that citizens can
initiate to engage directly with government.
f) Government-to-employee (G2E) – this involves online initiatives that will facilitate
the management of the civil service and internal communication with government and
its employees to make e-career applications and processing systems paperless in e-
office.
g) Government-to-non-profit (G2N) – this involves online information communication
services provided by the government to non-profit organizations, political parties,
legislatures and social organizations.
h) Non-profit-to-government (N2G) – this involves online exchange of information
communication services between non-profit organizations, political parties,
legislatures and social organizations and government.
The collaborative sharing of data in e-government space can be appositely classified
as a new type of e-government called government-to-public (G2P) sharing (Choi et al. 2013).
The G2P sharing paradigm advocates for openness to receive data or information pertaining
to citizens and share them in a timely manner amongst government agencies that need those
data or information towards enhancing the efficiency of public service delivery. This also
facilitates the creation of integrated personalized services that can be delivered to citizens
anywhere, anytime and to any device, transcending space, time and device differences. This
would sustain the smart-government development, allowing different types of data and
information sharing environments. However, provision of secure and trusted data in
information sharing is the utmost critical issues that will prevent leakage of secret and
sensitive information (Choi et al. 2013).
The study reported in this dissertation contributes to one of the four central research
questions in e-government, which is how decentralized government operations can be
seamlessly integrated (Scholl and Klischewski 2007). Moreover, the research concretely fits
into three research themes, namely information quality, data privacy and personal identity as
well as crossing borders that require governance proficiencies as identified in the eGovRTD
2020 project (Wimmer et al. 2008).
5
1.1 Problem Statement
Although e-government offers several opportunities such as increasing efficiency in
streamlining government procedures, refining internal communication and to provide better
customer services, it is still facing many challenges, including value realisation (Juell-Skielse
and Perjons, 2010), multi-technological chaos (Rosengren and Ohlsson, 2011), privacy,
security and disparities in computer access (Yang, 2011). In the context of South Africa, the
current huge concern for the government is the disconnected resources and operations of
various government departments. All the departments have their own internal information
systems catering for their own immediate needs without considering the future needs of data
sharing that can facilitate improved service delivery. Departments are not seamlessly
connected but instead are operating in silos. The automation of government activities in a silo
brings in danger and other challenges as governments cannot consolidate and standardize
their operations, preventing governments from reducing costs of maintaining their
information systems. Governments can massively reduce costs, time and effort needed for
running the operations of their information systems by promoting merging, elimination of
duplication and normalization of information systems through the process of secure data or
information sharing. The freed up resources can then be used for other useful projects that
may benefit society at large (Cowell and Martin 2003).
The Department of Public Service and Administration of the Republic of South Africa
has mentioned that the greatest hurdle is to upgrade the existing information systems across
government departments and to use cloud computing and web technologies at different levels
and for different processes. This change will enable the government to reduce the costs of
system maintenance and will pave the path for integrated e-government (DPSA 2014). The
following issues, therefore must be adequately tackled (Lofstedt 2012; Cordella 2013;
Linders 2012):
a) The speed of service delivery process must be at acceptable levels.
b) Reducing costs of the infrastructure changes by using the existing infrastructure when
the changeover happens.
c) The latest and most efficient technology must be used to fulfil government mandates.
d) Develop a vision of a connected government and use information technology to
support government objectives and a broader development agenda.
6
e) Document, re-engineer and streamline administrative and business processes to
deliver simpler, more effective services to citizens, businesses and other stakeholders,
thereby contributing to the strategic objective of customer service improvement.
f) Develop and implement immediate and interim measures to support effective and
secure information technology environment for governments.
g) Build the institutional arrangements and governance in which an effective team is
supported to realize much needed transformation and the building of a secure, cost
effective and aligned information technology capability on behalf of the state.
h) Redefine, rebuild and reinvent an information technology model for government or
single public service.
Any two separate government institutions willing to collaborate effectively must
define a common process, policies and outline the workflow. The inter-organizational
workflow (IOW) is a framework used by most organizations to support effective
collaboration between the varied and distributed business processes of diverse organizations
to achieve a shared goal. The management of the diverse organizations is the ultimate
problem in the IOW and remains the main reason for the failure in many e-government
projects. In addition, numerous other problems related to e-government still exist, such as
self-motivated work space, committed environment, semantic data interoperability and
technical interoperability. The information systems within the government space also face
two major problems, which are technological interoperability and data heterogeneity
(Chaabane et al.). Hopefully, seamless data sharing mechanisms in e-government space can
help to address the challenges of effective collaboration, openness, and transparency and
information quality.
1.2 Research Question
The intrinsic problems hindering effective interaction between government departments or
their information systems can be adequately resolved through a seamless data sharing
mechanism. As a result, arising from the problem statement is the following research
question being pursued in this study:
How should data be seamlessly shared in e-government space such that privacy of an
individual or an organisation is not overly compromised?
7
1.3 Research Goal and Objectives
Stemming from the research question enunciated, the overarching aim of this study is to
create a web application, is based on Hippocratic database principles, to support seamless
sharing of data in e-government space. The study at hand is guided by the following research
objectives:
a) To enable seamless data sharing across diverse government departments without any
changes to the existing system infrastructure.
b) To control the volume of data sharing more securely across government departments
using a coherent contract management technique implemented according to
Hippocratic database principles.
c) To reduce the time delay often experienced during cross verification of data involved
in government services.
d) To maintain a high level of consistency when data are shared across government
departments.
e) To eliminate the storage of duplicate data across government departments by sharing
the data from the source of truth.
1.4 Research Methods
The methodology of this study is primarily “soft design science research” (SDSR). The goal
of design science research (DSR) is to solve important business problems by creating and
developing good solutions using the latest information communication technology. The DSR
depends on the use of demanding methods to build and evaluate a design artefact (Hevner
and Chatterjee 2010). The creation of a lighter approach to DSR to address the important
business problems was suggested (Baskerville et al. 2009). Soft system methodology (SSM)
is an outstanding system science method to tackle the social-technical complications facing
an organisation. The SDSR methodology combines the principles from SSM with DSR to
provide a design thinking methodology to solve real world problems using good technology.
SDSR provides the possibilities to create new ways to progress and advance organisations
related to humans and to coherently tackle socioeconomic issues. SDSR enables the process
of developing solutions by following through the phases of design, implementation and
evaluation of a technological artefact. It enables identification and delineation of a specific
problem to solve. The problem must be articulated as a specific set of system requirements.
8
The requirements for the precise problem defined are then abstracted and converted into a
general problem with a technical, procedural and social dimensions. A common solution
design or a class of solutions for the general problem is then derived through systems
thinking and concretely expressed in terms of the general requirements. The general design
requirements are then compared with the precise problem for fitness. In this activity, the
precise problem has to be re-articulated in terms of the general requirements. A declarative
search is thereafter made for the particular components that will deliver a workable instance
of a realistic solution to the general requirements. An instance of the specific solution is
constructed, evaluated and deployed in the social system setting (Baskerville et al. 2009).
Crucial to the application of SDSR methodology in this study is the adoption of the unified
modelling language (UML) as a useful tool to support the modelling, visualisation and
representation of the components of DIG artefact being proposed. The UML helps to
facilitate different modelling activities of SDSR and DSR, such as exploration for general
components of a solution, together with ability to express the functionalities of the artefact
using imperative logic. The UML through its object constraint language (OCL) expressions
offers the capability of imperative logic to express constraints of the DIG application.
1.5 Study Scope
This research was motivated by the experiences faced by the citizens when accessing the
services of South African government departments. With the e-skills Colab at Durban
University of Technology behind the motivation of this research study, a cost effective DIG
solution is proposed to enable seamless data sharing between government departments that
will help to speed up government services without any changes to the government
infrastructure. The significance of the study is geared towards improving the service delivery
of South African government departments. The systematic documentation of the research
process, implementation of the proposed DIG application and results of the evaluation of the
study will greatly contribute to the information technology and e-government knowledge
domains. In particular, the significance of this study, is to deliver the services of the
government faster by eliminating the waiting period for data verification across inter
departments within the government space.
The scope of the research study at hand is limited to the government departments
within South Africa. The prototype DIG application for this case study is designed to solve
the process of current data sharing within government departments, which currently are
9
mainly a manual process and time consuming. However, the DIG application has a wider
usefulness and can be used by any organization that wants to speed up their process of data
sharing in the most secure way with data contract agreements.
1.6 Contributions
This research proposes the development of a lightweight data integration gateway (DIG),
which is a web application that can be used to facilitate seamless sharing of data maintained
by different disparate and heterogeneous information systems. The proposed DIG application
satisfies the following requirements:
a) Convenient – the language based on contract management policy borrowed from
Hippocratic database principles for specifying data of interest is intuitive, simple and
user friendly.
b) Preservation – enforcing data privacy policies through a set of contract agreement
policies that do not require any change to the current database systems managing the
source databases.
c) Persistency – data privacy policies could be created, stored and can be managed as
contracts in an external database that is private to the gateway.
d) Protection – contents of source databases are not altered, no data write access given to
the gateway and data read by the gateway from the source databases are not stored in
the database maintained by the gateway, but such data are delivered to the requesters
as portable files.
The potency of the Hippocratic data sharing approach being proposed in this study is
built on two technical properties. Firstly, it supports field and record level data privacy
enforcement policies. Secondly, it allows full use of the standard structured query language
(SQL) query capabilities to express policies for seamless data sharing. In more detail, the
contributions of the research reported in this dissertation are:
a) The investigation of an approach for a seamless Hippocratic sharing of data
maintained by different heterogeneous information systems with specific reference to
e-government space.
b) The examination of several implementation issues of a seamless Hippocratic data
sharing technique, including secure metadata storage, efficient query formulation
policies and data structure for the storage of contract information.
10
c) The experimental evaluation of the proposed application shows that the data sharing
approach has low overheads and speeds up data sharing and information verification
time.
The original research reported in this dissertation piggybacks on a number of existing
techniques and principles to evolve DIG for a seamless sharing of data with focus on e-
government space. However, the proposed application has a much wider spectrum of
applications. A growing range of possible application areas are in content management
applications, customer/consumer support services, e-commerce and e-education which
require intensive levels of data privacy. Many such applications may use security policies to
seamlessly access control data and eliminate duplication of data. The dissemination of the
results of this research will definitely contribute to knowledge sharing in the e-government
field.
1.7 Synopsis
Chapter 1 of this dissertation introduces the background to the research and discusses the
need for data sharing across government departments with particular reference to the South
Africa scenario. In addition, the context of the problem domain, the research question that
guides the study, the goals and objectives of the study, the research methods used, the scope
of this study and decisive contributions of the study are clearly delineated in this chapter.
Chapter 2 comprehensively discusses the related literature on e-government, data
sharing and Hippocratic data contract. Chapter 3 provides the systematic documentation of
the research design and holistic approach that is followed in modelling the proposed
prototype application for the Hippocratic data sharing management within the e-government
space. This chapter also unpacks the theoretical foundation that guided the research and how
the soft design science research methodology was systematically followed in designing the
prototype data sharing application being proposed in this study. Chapter 4 presents the
implementation of the prototype data sharing application and discusses the evaluation of the
artefacts in addressing the research problem. Chapter 5 discusses the results, presents the
reflection of the researcher and concludes with recommendations for further research.
11
CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE OVERVIEW
This chapter focuses on providing a rigorous and structured overview of relevant
literature with regard to their coverage of description of e-government, opportunities for e-
government, challenges in e-government, growth stages of e-government, the state of e-
government in developing countries, technology adoption for data sharing in government
departments and e-government data sharing models.
2.1 Definition of e-Government
There exists numerous e-government definitions in the literature, but they are all associated
with the use of information communication technology (ICT), mainly the internet, to
transform, re-engineer, improve or enhance government business processes. The term
“information communication technology” covers internet technologies, internet applications,
internet services and internet based components that are needed to execute business solutions
more effectively and more efficiently. Sinawong (2008) states e-government as the use of
ICT, particularly the internet, as media to achieve a better government that delivers improved
public services and enhances internal department works in a more useful, customer oriented
and cost effective manner. Yanqing (2011) states that e-government is the use of ICT to
improve government processes and re-engineer government services. Fang (2002) defines e-
government as the innovative use of ICT to provide more convenient access to government
information and services, making government services accessible from anywhere anytime.
This in turn improves the quality, reduces time delay and encourages more participation
between the government and citizens. Nkwe (2012) argues that ICT has changed the way
human activities are performed in different sectors around the world. Yanqing (2011) states
that implementing e-government crosses many service delivery, legislative, digital divide,
privacy, public access, and information security issues.
In general, governments across the world see ICT as a protagonist for government
reform because their aspiration is to improve the welfare of citizens and to deliver quality
services that add value to the citizens. Private companies have adopted ICT quickly and
12
across the spectrum to do their daily business more efficiently. Information communication
technology has also changed the way governments deliver services to their citizens and
businesses as well as how they communicate and interact with people who need government
services. A visit to government departments is a not a pleasant experience as the services
offered by government is characterised by a lot of paperwork with the intrinsic manual
process, long queues for each section of services, inadequate spaces and a lot of frustrations
related to inefficient services. The transition around the world to using ICT for government
service delivery has provoked citizens to demand better services from the government. The
public sector and governments are under heavy pressure to deliver the services at the needed
time and with high quality. Citizens and business organisations prefer engaging government
services without having to physically go to the government departments. Governments are
doing their best to tackle these expectations by reforming and re-engineering the existing
government processes and translating them to ICT automated processes.
2.2 Opportunities for E-government
The effective application of e-government to fulfil the aspirations of citizens and businesses
is the cardinal motive of governments across the world. Governments are putting a strong
effort on using ICT to redefine, re-engineer and reorganise public services to better serve
their citizens. ICT provides efficient resources and a platform for data sharing, information
dissemination and communication, which are the key functionalities needed for effective
public participation in government. In order to seamlessly integrate all the information
systems in the government departments to support massive citizen’s participation in
government activities, the existing work processes which brought about e-government in the
first place must be improved, redesigned or re-engineered. The government process redesign
opens up new possibilities for information availability, communications possibility, seamless
services to its citizens and good planning process through the use of e-government
(Bhattacharya et al. 2012). The assurance of E-government is to make the government more
responsive, efficient, legitimate and transparent, which is a technical, economic and social
problem.
Ndou (2004) pointed out a long time ago that government and the public have realized
the several opportunities offered by ICT to fulfil the insatiable demands of citizens. ICT in
government reforms have great potential to provide better services to the citizens and can
increase government efficiency by enabling the restructuring of the existing process in the
13
government. The challenge of e-government is how to help facilitate citizens-to-government
interactivity and make service delivery more efficient by allowing data or information
sharing. Moreover, the current structure of government departments and their information
systems are disparate and filled with virtual boundaries, making it difficult to achieve
effective data sharing with minimum costs. The challenge of inter-organizational or inter-
department data sharing has given rise to organizational boundaries. Data sharing overcoming
cross-boundary in terms of departments and integrating them has been long identified as
major enablers for improving government departments and organizational efficiency (Thakur
and Singh 2012). The government of any nation can achieve healthier strategic decisions and
better-quality problem solving techniques when its departments have aggregated data and
knowledge sharing across boundaries (Mohammed et al. 2012).
Researching the significance of inter-department data sharing, vertical and horizontal
directions data sharing have been identified and a theoretical framework for understanding
the boundaries in data sharing initiatives has been defined (Thakur and Singh 2012). The
integration of various information systems inside and across external organizational
boundaries remains costly and time-consuming (Mohammed et al. 2012). This is because of
heterogeneity of computing environments involved and a shortage of technical infrastructure
in the public sector. The growing cooperation of organizations has resulted in the need to
share data more effectively. The sharing of information is still affected by privacy concerns,
organizational structure and technical issues, which have to be taken into account (Asogwa
2013). The existing literature studies have identified a host of opportunities that e-
government offers, including the following:
a) To increase efficiency by streamlining the business process: implementing e-
government could decrease the number of stages involved in tedious business
processes and functions that are currently manual. This saves effort and time and
reduces the pressure around government offices (Ndou 2004; Almarabeh and AbuAli
2010; Singh and Karaulia 2011).
b) To improving internal communication: using ICT to connect within local
government can be made easier. Tracking of the events and programme happening in
each department is easier. Head of the department can keep the executives up-to-date
with regular communications and emails (Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010; Singh and
Karaulia 2011).
c) To providing better customer service: giving self-service access to information via
the internet can definitely improve citizen’s access to government services.
14
Technologies like automated telephone systems can improve citizen services (Ndou
2004; Singh and Karaulia 2011).
d) To keep pace with citizen expectation: society is being moved to the latest
technologies, citizens and business are working electronically and therefore they
expect the same from their local government (Singh and Karaulia 2011).
e) Sharing data constantly and consistently: data sharing leads to transparency,
openness, anticorruption and accountability as citizens participate in decision making
with the government based on information at their disposal. Government will be run
by the people because individuals are well informed about government activities
(Ndou 2004; Singh and Karaulia 2011).
f) Reducing cost or increasing revenue: implementing e-government leads to
centralizing government information systems and removes duplication of information
and processes, thereby reducing cost and increasing government’s revenue (Singh and
Karaulia 2011)(Singh and Karaulia 2011).
g) Restructuring of administrative process: moving to e-government changes the way
government interacts with citizens, business and other governments. This requires the
restructuring of internal and external administrative processes so that they are more
efficient (Singh and Karaulia 2011).
h) Data and process standardization: when data sharing is enabled with the
implementation of government processes then most of the processes and formats of
protocol used can be standardized across government departments (Hwang et al.
2004).
i) Clearly defined authority and responsibility of users: the users of e-government
are accountable and responsible for the outcome of the services. This speeds up the
service delivery process from the government end (Hwang et al. 2004).
j) High security: security and privacy are the key feature of e-government. Centralized
systems within government data centers and secure access to government information
increases the security of the systems and data when compared to the decentralized
systems without e-government (Hwang et al. 2004).
k) Decreasing corruption: every service from every government department do exactly
as per the rules and processes defined (Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010).
l) Trust building: e-government systems build trust between the government and the
citizens by prompt, efficient, secure, cost effective service delivery from the
government (Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010).
15
2.3 Challenges of E-government
Although e-government offers several opportunities for transforming government operations,
there are still huge challenges. In the context of South Africa for an instance, the
characteristics and challenges of data sharing amongst governments seem to be similar
among all government departments. Although each government department has a centralised
computing system for data storage and retrieval, the operation of departmental data is vertical
integration between the head office and its regional or suburb offices. There is no
provisioning of services that request for intra data sharing across different government
departments that are disparately distributed. The current process of data sharing in many
government departments in South Africa is still a manual process, which is very time
consuming and prone to errors. The various studies from different government departments
have identified environment, external and internal factors as hindering the process of data
sharing in government departments (Davison et al. 2005; Kasim 2008; Tsai et al. 2009). Even
though the internet infrastructure in South Africa ranks highly, this infrastructure is not used
much. To overcome the infrastructure and the application upgrade challenges to use the latest
internet technologies will take a long time. The fastest way to implement and enable data
sharing amongst government departments, which is the motivation for this research, is to use
the existing infrastructure and still provide for data sharing.
As the internet is linking the vast majority of people together, the advancement of e-
government represents government’s reaction to the shifting world of information technology
(Xu, W and Zhou 2008). With the e-government initiative the traditional government can
tackle the traditional problems of government services, using the latest internet technologies
and modern communication devices. This initiative will enable government to transform to e-
government, but comes with many challenges that must be taken into account to
accommodate the difficult relationships between government and its constituencies to enable
transaction interaction and the delivery of government services (Wang and Hou 2010). The
literature has identified a number of common challenges facing e-government across the
world, including the following:
a) Technological and infrastructure development: implementation of the latest
hardware technologies to accommodate modern internet and web technologies.
This is a very costly transformation from traditional government to e-government
16
(Reffat 2003; Hwang et al. 2004; Ndou 2004; Sinawong 2008; Xu, W and Zhou
2008; Khan et al. 2010; Wang and Hou 2010; Dawes et al. 2012).
b) Security: security is costly and must be adequately addressed in the design phase
of e-government. Security leads to trust, which is a vital component of e-
government (Reffat 2003; Sinawong 2008; Xu, W and Zhou 2008; Yanqing
2011).
c) Interoperability: the ability to make systems and organizations work together
seamlessly to enable data sharing and a comprehensive overhaul over the legacy
systems is crucial for success of e-government (Reffat 2003; Almarabeh and
AbuAli 2010).
d) Privacy: protecting the privacy of citizens’ personal data and government
department’ private information, while enabling data sharing, is an important
consideration for successful e-government (Reffat 2003; Sinawong 2008; Yanqing
2011).
e) Digital divide: this refers to the gap between people who have access to the
internet and those who do not. Without internet the people cannot access the data,
information or services which the government wants the citizens, business and
government to access (Reffat 2003; Xu, W and Zhou 2008; Sang et al. 2009;
Khan et al. 2010; Yanqing 2011).
f) Transparency: the lack of transparency between government and people prevents
the public form actively participating in government decision making process
(Reffat 2003; Ndou 2004; Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010).
g) Web based service delivery: the establishment of a secure e-government
infrastructure and web based service delivery can be consider a difficult task
because of the unavailability of technical personnel (Juell-Skielse and Perjons
2009).
h) Awareness of potential costs: lack of awareness of the potential cost of e-
government amongst e-government practitioners can lead to implementation
failure (Sinawong 2008; Dawes et al. 2012).
i) Leadership and management factor: political leadership with a clear vision is
vital to ensure the successful implementation of e-government and efficient
change management processes (Hwang et al. 2004; Ndou 2004; Sinawong 2008;
Sang et al. 2009; Yanqing 2011; Dawes et al. 2012).
17
j) Legal substructure: the laws and regulation required to permit and to support the
move to e-government are often not promulgated in many countries (Reffat 2003;
Hwang et al. 2004; Xu, W and Zhou 2008; Sang et al. 2009).
k) Institutional infrastructure: e-government can only progress if there are
institutions capable of supporting and implementing the technology at low cost
(Sang et al. 2009; Khan et al. 2010).
l) Low human capital index: absence of ICT literacy skills and lack of readiness of
local content and national language versions of government websites is a serious
challenge (Ndou 2004; Khan et al. 2010).
m) Trust: e-government systems must be built and installed with trust from agencies
across governments, business, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and
citizens. They are the end users and their buy-in is a must to make the e-
government systems successful (Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010).
2.4 Growth Stages of E-government
The original research reported in this dissertation has classified the growth stages of e-
government into inception, maturity and innovation based on decades of advancement in ICT.
2.4.1 Inception Stage
During the periods of 1990 to 1999, the implementation of e-government made significant
interaction between government employees and their departments easier. Computing
technologies such as minicomputers, mainframe computers and desktop computers were
predominantly used to automate the business processes of government. Meanwhile, the
service subscribers or citizens faced difficulty in accessing services mainly because of
interdependency between various government departments. There was considerable delay in
the verification of data or information pertaining to a subscriber when more than one
government department had to be consulted. Figure 2.1 portrays this scenario, wherein high
communication latency can be observed between service providers and service subscribers,
but there was low communication latency between government departments. This was due to
the fact that individual service subscribers had to physically visit each government
department for a service subscription process to be successfully completed. The inception
18
stage can be likened to the first generation e-government, which is more about computing
adoption by government for business process automation.
Figure 2.1: E-Government reforms at the inception stage (1990-99)
(Tallo 2013)
2.4.2 Maturity Stage
The advancement in e-government technology from 2000 to 2010 made the interaction
between government employees and subscribers easier. This was the period of electronic
transformation of government business processes. During the period, the world experienced
massive applications of computing power through the emergence of the internet and web
applications to offer government services online. The maturity stage can be likened to second
generation e-government in which technology enabled government transformation into
subscriber-centric and integrated government. The subscribers could access services within a
particular government department without feeling the interdependency that exists across
diverse government departments. However, as shown in Figure 2.2, this improvement in
service delivery does not eliminate the complication in the interaction between service
providers and government departments, making service delivery inefficient. This was because
of high interdependency between government departments and inability of different
government information systems to seamlessly interoperate and share subscriber data
effectively (Tallo 2013).
19
Figure 2.2: E-Government reforms at the maturity stage (2000-2010)
(Tallo 2013)
2.4.3 Innovation Stage
The current e-government vision for 2011-2020 is to solve data interoperability problems to
improve efficiency in service delivery. The period 2011-2020 is regarded as an innovation
stage of e-government or third generation e-government where technology will enable
government transformation into smart government. During this period computing power,
such as cloud computing, mobile devices, smart televisions, sensor and wireless devices,
mobile networks and phatic technology will be used to transform government processes that
allow citizens and civil society to co-create with government. Phatic technology is any kind
of technology such as social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and WhatsApp – that
facilitate communication, content sharing, collaboration and interaction amongst people. The
use of big data analytics, which is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns
in data, will drive government policy action, facilitate effective communications, rapid
transaction execution and improve service delivery. There will be openness, transparency,
accountability, innovative services, data privacy and massive availability of information for
knowledge creation and knowledge transfer. Governments across the world will able to
provide service bundles for governmental one-stop-shop to their subscribers as an effective
20
way of improving service delivery (Linders 2012). The one-stop-shop service allows
subscribers to get everything they need in just one stop without any officialdom.
This new version of innovation in government offers the reward that efficient
interaction between subscribers and government departments will be facilitated by web,
internet, cloud and mobile phones using a central government gateway. The central gateway
will absorb all the convoluted interactions using a mobile cloud service technology to deliver
real-time innovative services to subscribers (Tallo 2013). Figure 2.3 portrays this innovation
in e-government business processes.
Figure 2.3: E-Government reforms at the innovation stage (2011-2020)
(Tallo 2013)
The research reported in this dissertation purports to lay a solid foundation for smart
government and can be classified as contributing to the innovative stage of e-government.
This research proposes Hippocratic data sharing management in e-government space in order
to significantly contribute to the future e-government vision. The Hippocratic data sharing
mechanism requires a data sharing contract to be established between government
departments that want to participate in the data sharing process. This implies that any
information that is required by a subscriber would automatically be sent to the target source
which is the publisher, provided that information resides elsewhere centrally within the e-
government space and the subscriber can access the data by contract. In the context of this
research, a contract denotes the specification of rules or policies governing data disclosure. A
particular government department or an institution, for example, adopts a data disclosure
21
contract to specify who is allowed to access what data and for what purpose data may be
disallowed to each recipient (Agarwal 2012). The contracts are expressed in a simple and
understandable privacy language.
2.5 State of e-Government Development in Developing Countries
Implementing e-government to fulfil the needs and aspiration of citizens and business are the
main motive of governments across the world. Governments are putting strong efforts into
redefining and reorganizing public services for the benefits of their citizens. With e-
government, data sharing and easy communication is made possible, which are the key
functionalities needed for public participation in government. In order to facilitate seamless
integration of all the systems in the government departments, the existing work process must
be improved and redesigned. This required redesign opens up possibilities of achieving
information availability, effective communications and good planning processes. The key
emphasis of e-government across countries is to provide seamless services to its citizens
(Bhattacharya et al. 2012).
Many developed countries of the world have successfully implemented e-government
which is making an impact on, and changing the lives of, their citizens. There are a lot of case
studies that illustrate this direction. The IDABC (Interoperable Delivery of European e-
Government Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens), which is the
European Union Program that promotes the correct use of ICT for cross-border services in
Europe (IDABC 2009). There is also the IBM Smarter Government initiative that promotes
collaboration from the local council to international level in the United States of America.
When we compare the countries in the Africa in terms of their state of e-government
development, against the rest of the world, it can be stated without any doubt that African
nations have to go a long way to achieve the full benefits of e-government implementation.
There are several challenges in African countries such as scarcity of internet access, lack of
proper internet infrastructure, lack of transparency and accountability in government, that are
hindering e-government development.
Mutula (2008) points out that from an African perspective, finding a precise status of
e-government implemented in sub-Saharan Africa is difficult because the majority of case
studies conducted on e-government do not fully cover each and every country in the
designated location. Thakur and Singh (2012) state that in recent years there has been
increased pressure from citizens and business on governments to deliver quality services that
22
are more efficient, reliable, convenient and faster. The applications, systems and platforms
designed to fulfil the requirements of quality services are referred to as e-government. E-
government services are being provided by connecting the government, citizens and business,
but the availability of such services are few and expensive. Due to this reason citizens are
raising their anger and are demanding improved service levels. In order to achieve
government-centric services, they must be developed to fulfil citizen led initiatives.
Heeks (2001) reiterates that e-government programmes in South Africa are usually
implemented by following the top-down approach. This approach focuses on management
ideas and therefore the requirements of the citizens are not as much in focus as they should
be. In order to provide a robust and better public service delivery, good and smooth
communication between the government and citizens is a must. E-government platforms in
developing countries provide an excellent channel for communication between government
stakeholders and the public in real time. E-communications have become gradually more
essential for interacting, communicating and exchanging data/information in the workplace.
Many of the organizations are dispersed and are geographically isolated, so e-communication
is a can solve inherent communication problems (Abodohoui et al., 2014).
Rorissa et al. (2011) benchmarked e-government development in a sample of sub-
Saharan government websites. They placed Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana and Burkina
Faso as the top 5 countries with developed e-government. South Africa was placed in the 49th
position out of 58 countries. The research work at the Waseda University for nine years
monitored and surveyed the development of e-government worldwide and has scored
Singapore, Finland and USA as the top countries that are well developed in e-government
amongst the 55 countries that were studied. Figure 2.4 shows this result of e-government
development ranking, where it can be seen that only four Africa countries featured in the
raking. South Africa was ranked 36, followed by Nigeria (ranked 47), then Egypt (ranked 48)
and Tunisia (ranked 53).
23
Figure 2.4: Waseda University E-Government world ranking 2013 (de Jager and van Reijswoud 2008)
In many developing countries of the world, government is redesigned by two types of
emerging trends. The top most trend is decentralized, hierarchical and vertical government
systems to the polycentric networks of governance, built on horizontal integration between
different departments and multifaceted societies. The next change is the introduction to ICT
that is targeted at transforming the delivery of public services. The e-governance concept is a
merger of these two trends (de Jager and van Reijswoud 2008).
Heeks (2001) mentioned three separate, but interconnected practical domains of e-
governance (Figure 2.5) that when implementing e-government must be carefully considered
and proper analysis must be done to avoid the overlap and duplication of their functionalities.
These domains are:
a) E-Administration – improving the business processes of government using ICT.
b) E-Services: connecting individual citizens with their governments using ICT.
c) E-Society: building interactions with and within civil society using ICT.
24
Figure 2.5: Overlapping of e-governance
(Heeks 2001)
The governments in developing countries are under intense pressure to review and
update their business processes (Jager et al. 2008). The developed countries that have
implemented e-government are asking the developing countries to support decentralization,
decrease corruption, increase transparency and to participate in the global digital information
sharing. The private sectors in the developing countries are demanding additional openness
and are keen to participate in open and transparent relationships with the governments. The
citizens of these countries are demanding faster and better services and are demanding to
extend the government services to rural areas. (Beynon-Davies 2007) states that over the last
few years, many deficiencies are present in the current documented formations of e-
government. Moreover, the majority of them are around the lack of holistic conception that
takes into consideration, the full socio-technical environment of the government processes.
E-government therefore must solve the complex societal problems taking the
technical and process change. Beynon-Davies (2007) presents a number of metal models that
are organised around the vertical dimension that considers the aspects of infrastructure, which
are made up of human activity infrastructure long with the informatics infrastructure. The
horizontal dimensions use e-government business models, which are G2B, G2C and C2C and
the value creating system (VCS) that supports the human activity. Figure 2.6 shows the
human activity infrastructure of the e-government model where all human activity system in
internal and external value chains will depend on information systems for effective, robust
and efficient collaboration and harmonization of activities.
25
Figure 2.6: Human activity infrastructure of e-government model
(Beynon-Davies 2007)
Davison et al. (2005) illustrated a transition model for the conversion from
government to e-government and the steps needed in this process. The purpose of their model
was to provide a guide for governments to clearly understand the motivations for the need of
e-government, and to avoid any possible problems during the transition. They stated that in
traditional government the perception of the government is a slow-moving and delayed
administration, resisting to change with new technology, inconvenient and confusing process.
In this type of government the citizens and business involve with the government in
numerous areas, but because of the lengthy process and absence of new technology, a vast
amount of paperwork is created. The early adoption of internet technologies promotes the
automation of the existing government process with less redesign and innovation. The
authors also stated that a good e-government characteristics should be openness, clearness of
purpose and immediate responsiveness to its citizens along with its internal efficiency and
effectiveness. Hence, they proposed the e-government maturity model and the strategic
transformation to e-government (Figure 2.7). The mature e-government is recognised by the
high levels of competence, performance and includes data sharing across government
26
departments and units that will help to reduce process times within the workflow of each
government department.
Figure 2.7: E-government maturity model
(Davison et al. 2005)
Sahraoui (2007) addresses the high failure rates of e-governments in developing
countries because of the presence of a “design-reality-gap” where e-government programs
did not mirror the reality of government. Sahraoui’s view is that e-government should
improve the activities and services of government by making government services more
accessible, effective and accountable. When government services are delivered online via e-
government to citizens, efficiency is achieved. The governance model of e-government
increases the participation of the citizens in the affairs of their government. Sahraoui (2007)
therefore proposes the e-inclusion model of the governance, which should be a stage of e-
government adoption. This stage demands that all citizens within the government should have
equal access and opportunity to the mechanics of service delivery from the government.
Equal opportunity is achieved through a partnership between the government, the private
sector and civil society. Figure 2.8 shows the e-inclusion model, which can be useful only
27
when political, economic, technological and social barriers are removed and access to e-
government opportunities is equitable.
Figure 2.8: Model of e-inclusion
(Sahraoui 2007)
Chun et al. (2012) state that interactions occur within and across G2G, G2B, G2C and
between international governments in a still and dynamic fashion. The collaboration from the
interactions therefore increases the effectiveness of government by inspiring partnerships,
participation and engagements across government. They pointed out that the motivations of
e-government collaborations between G2G, G2B and G2C may differ and are made up of
diverse motivational forces that drives collaborative e-government (Figure 2.9). The value-
driven forces shape the governments to deliver better decision making skills and increases
better service provisioning and to achieve domain specific goals. The main benefits of
28
collaborative government is the sharing of data or information that permits a smooth process
design and that offers better and timely services for its citizens. The collaborative e-
government applies collective intelligence for innovative solutions to the problems as well as
offer a shared governance that adopts the trust and confidence of citizens in government.
Figure 2.9: Collaborative e-government forces
(Chun et al. 2012)
Chen et al. (2011) argues that many of the recent studies shows indifference between
the e-government models and e-government advancement around the world. Many of the
models were developed for the improvement and understanding of e-government in the last
decade. Chen et al. (2011), therefore, suggested a three-dimensional model for e-government
advancement for better administration and improved service delivery. This three-dimensional
model proposes that taking ICT alone will not attain the best result for the quality and
service. The other four factors in the e-government development, which are effectiveness,
appropriate functionality, governance and capability of the applications with respect to the
efficiency and quality and the applications themselves must play a vital role in the
accomplishment of e-government implementation (Chen et al. 2011).
29
2.6 Rationale for E-Government Data Sharing
Previous authors have argued that information communication technology (ICT) has
dramatically changed the way human activities are performed in different sectors around the
world (Fang, 2002; Ndou, 2004; Nkwe, 2012). Private companies have embraced ICT to
deliver improved services. ICT has changed, tremendously, the way governments deliver the
services to their citizens and businesses as well as how they communicate and interact with
the people needing government services using a technology called e-government. The
governments in many developing countries are striving to improve the welfare of citizens and
to deliver quality services that add value to the citizens. However, many services offered by
governments are still associated with a lot of paperwork coupled with manual processes, long
queues for each section of service, inadequate spaces and a lot of frustrations related to
inefficient services. The public sector and the governments are under intense pressure to
deliver services at the needed time and with high quality. Citizens and business preferably
want services without physically going to government departments. Governments are doing
their best to tackle the demands of citizens by reforming and re-engineering the existing
government processes and translating these processes into automated ICT solutions.
E-government has a great potential to provide improved government services to the
citizens and can increase efficiency by restructuring the existing process in government
departments. However, the actual challenge of e-government is how to help facilitate citizen
to government interaction and to make service delivery more efficient. Data/information
sharing can be helpful in speeding government service provisioning, but the current structure
of government departments and their information systems are disparate and distributed with
virtual boundaries, which make it more difficult to achieve effective data sharing with
minimum costs. The challenge of inter-organizational or inter-department data sharing has
given rise to organizational boundaries. Data sharing can be useful in overcoming barriers of
cross-boundary because integrating government departments has been long identified as a
major enabler for improving organizational efficiency (Thakur and Singh 2012).
Governments can also achieve healthier strategic decisions and better-quality problem
solving techniques when their departments have aggregated data and knowledge sharing
mechanisms (Mohammed et al. 2012).
30
Researching the significance of inter-department data sharing (Thakur and Singh
2012) identified vertical and horizontal directions for data sharing and they defined a
theoretical framework for understanding boundaries in data sharing initiatives. The
integration of various information systems inside and external to organizational boundaries
remains costly and time-consuming (Mohammed et al. 2012). This is because of
heterogeneity of computing environments involved and a shortage of technical infrastructure
in the public sector, which is a real challenge. The growing cooperation of organizations has
resulted in the need to share data more effectively. The sharing of information is still affected
by privacy concerns, organizational structure and technical issues, which have to be taken
into account (Asogwa 2013). Data sharing across government sectors and departments forms
an important component of e-communication system. de Jager and van Reijswoud (2008)
point out several advantages of e-communications amongst which are the following:
a) Cooperation between teams and collaborative teamwork.
b) A complicated business process that can be solved.
c) Rapid communication with the administration and stakeholders.
d) Cost effective communication as traditional process like postage usage, telephony and
travel expenses are eliminated.
e) Due to openness the complex layers of management are reduced.
f) Instant accessibility to information makes strategic decision making easier and faster.
g) Contributes to improved public administration performance.
h) A red-tape orientation in organizations is removed.
2.7 Barriers to E-Government Data Sharing
From a review of the literature it is evident that are many challenges and difficulties to be
faced while implementing e-government. The important factors that indicate the success or
the failure of e-government acceptance may vary according to the location of the country and
its local context. The barriers facing successful e-government data sharing were identified to
include lack of good ICT infrastructure, lack of good digital security and privacy issues
(Lofstedt 2012). Privacy of data/information and digital security is a very severe technical
barrier that was identified by many of the researchers and this serious concern was mentioned
in many journals of e-government implementation (Ostberg 2010). The barriers in developing
countries are much more than ICT and e-government implementation. The basic needs for the
citizens and the control of corruption, poverty eradication, increasing the literacy levels,
31
upskilling the poor ICT skills and the technical ability and solving the power crisis are other
barriers that must be resolved before looking at e-government data sharing in developing
countries (de Jager and van Reijswoud 2008; Al-Rashidi 2013). The barriers to efficient e-
government that can hamper effective data sharing as identified by Lofstedt (2012) are as
follows:
a) No strong ICT hardware and software Infrastructure.
b) No proper project planning and inadequate knowledge about e-government program.
c) Absence or shortage of security and privacy of data and information.
d) Nonexistence of capable and skilled workforce.
e) The cultural difference within the government and across departments.
f) Good guidance from the leaders and poor management support.
g) Absence of well-defined policies and guideline for e-usage.
h) Lack of partnership with 3rd party service providers.
i) Deficiency of proper strategic plans.
j) Resistance from the entities involved in e-government to change to change over to e-
systems.
k) Unavailability of financial funding and resources.
Table 2.1 summarizes the barriers to inter-organisational data sharing as pointed out
by (Debnath et al. 2008).
Table 2.1: Barriers to inter-organisational data sharing
(Debnath et al. 2008)
Barriers Details
Institutional culture issues The issues related to ideological, technical complexity, politics,
history, ideology, muscle power and even location falls under this
category.
Conflicting priorities among
participating organizations
Different data standards, leadership issues, hardware equipment,
department’s interest and different levels of training are part of this
category.
Absence of resources Deficiency of skilled human and latest technical resources.
Poor implementation of
standards
Difference with data definitions, data formats and data models
across the organisations.
Overheads of coordination Expenses encountered while coordinating activities across different
organizations.
32
2.8 E-Government Data Sharing Models
Makedon et al. (2003) proposed a negotiation-based data sharing system called SCENS
(Secure Content Exchange Negotiation System). The SCENS was developed at Dartmouth
College which is a multi-layer scalable system that brings guarantee to transaction safety
using several security mechanisms. The system was based on a metadata with varied
information and was then applied to a number of various domains. They proved that with
vulnerable and disseminated information, government users may bring an agreement on the
conditions of data/information sharing by negotiation.
Liu and Chetal (2005) suggested an interest based trust model and data sharing
protocol to solve the difficultly of data/information sharing between government
organizations. The proposed protocol integrated a varied range of information rules and
policies, along with trust negotiation during information exchange. The added policies made
the parties who are interested in sharing data to be dependent upon each other. The protocol
was implemented using the latest internet technology of XML web services. The
implementation is suited for the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) reference models and
can be integrated into the e-government systems.
Ager et al. (2006) developed a set of policy based technologies to enable data/information
sharing across government departments easy without negotiating individual privacy or
information security. The model design consists of line-grained access controls that support
filter semantics for complex policy condition. A policy ability assists to consolidate
information from multiple sources to the source’s original disclosure policies. Creation of a
department that allows departments to apply item-level security arrangements and disclosure
policies. The auditing of histroy of each information accessed in the system is also avaliable.
The auditing method screens information derivations along the time to support the evaluation
of information quality. The ultimate goal was to offer the possibility of solving major
information sharing problems in government departments and to offer direction for the
expansion of upcoming government owned insformation systems.
Sandhu et al. (2006) projected the ways where recent Trusted Computing (TC)
technologies can help in secure data/information sharing, compared to those not offering pre-
TC technology. The Policy, Enforcement and Implementation (PEI) framework produced by
them highlights three distinct layers at which security policy and design decisions need to be
made. The PEI framework made possible to evaluate in detail, the potential TC applications
for secure information sharing in their upcoming work.
33
Fan and Zhang (2007) had presented a conceptual model for data/information
exchange in digital government infrastructure. They found out that the Government-
Government (G2G) information sharing model will assist in the understanding of G2G
information sharing and can assist decision makers in making decisions with regards to G2G
information sharing. Fan and Zhang tested the conceptual model with the purpose of finding
the factors that influence electronic (or digital) government information sharing. The model
was highlighted via a case study under the Chinese government system.
Headayetullah and Pradhan (2009) proposed a protocol for sharing data securely
across different government agencies for the main motive of streamlining government
services. This protocol was proficient and innovative for trust-based data sharing, exchange
of confidential information amongst government intelligence agencies across national and
international boundaries using public key encryption. The protocol uses MD5 algorithm for
data integrity and public key across cryptosystem for confidentiality and authentication and
complex mapping for agency identification. The protocol supports privacy protection and
information sharing with possible restrictions based on the trust level maintained between the
donor and the receiver of information. The protocol ensures secure and streamlined
information/data sharing within government intelligence agencies to avoid threatening
activities.
Oberholzer et al. (2012) presented a Hippocratic privacy protection framework (HPP)
which is based on the concept of privacy contract. This prototype was used for protecting
personal information in cooperate organisations, which are becoming increasingly concerned.
Decision criteria that are needed for privacy protection are very complex. A classic problem
in this context concerns about giving the individuals an improved control over their personal
information, and at the same time allows the organisation to process its transactions based on
the same personalised information. A prototype of the HPP framework was built to serve as a
proof of concept in order to demonstrate the developed HPP framework becomes applicable
and therefore serve as an efficacious model for solving privacy problems. With this
prototype, the HPP framework afforded individuals more control over their personal
information.
2.9 Literature Summary
The chief motive of this research study is to come up with a data sharing working prototype
system for e-government that can enable data sharing with data contract management as a
34
practical implementation tool for security and privacy protection. The development of the
framework underlying the development of data sharing system was inspired by the following
models.
a) Hippocratic privacy protection framework (HPP) by Oberholzer et al. (2012) –
decision criteria that are needed for protecting privacy and control over personal
information when sharing information.
b) Policy based technologies model by Ager et al. (2006) – consolidation of information
from multiple sources across departments, subjected to the source’s original
disclosure policies.
c) Sharing secure information between protocol by Headayetullah and Pradha (2009) –
trust-based information sharing protocol that can provide secure exchange of
information, with authentication and encryption.
d) Policy based technologies to enable information sharing by Ager et al. (2006) –
auditing method that traces information changes over time along with consolidation of
information from multiple sources across departments, subject to the source’s original
disclosure policies with.
The potential merits of using the Data Sharing Gateway (DIG) originating from this research
study as a proof-of-concept formalism are the following:
a) The DIG enables both the column and row level privacy protection of information
that can be implemented through the data contracts.
b) The DIG model is a lightweight web application framework that can connect to any
type of database to enable information sharing.
c) The DIG model can be implemented within governments to enable data sharing,
without any changes to the existing hardware infrastructure and the software
applications.
The common goals of all the data sharing models as uncovered from the literature in
the course of this study are the following:
a) To enable seamless information sharing in government, private or corporate
departments.
b) To seamlessly implement trust and security policies using trusted computing
technologies.
c) To seamlessly integrate security and privacy related policies with data sharing
protocols.
35
In this chapter of the dissertation, the researcher found it expedient to conclude with a
succinct summary of e-government models and problems solved in related studies (Table
2.2).
Table 2.2: Summary of Related e-Government Model
E-government model description Problem Addresses
SCENS: Secure Content Exchange Negotiation
System proposed by Makedon et al. (2003), is a
multi-layered saleable systems that brings
surety to transactions safety.
Content Exchange Negotiation System that distributed the
information to government users based on the condition of
sharing information.
Government (G2G) information exchange in
electronic government infrastructure using
information sharing conceptual model by Fan
and Zhang (2007)
Government-Government (G2G) information/data sharing
in e-government, assistance in framing decisions.
Sandhu et al. (2006) projected methods using
recent computing technologies and how it can
assist with the secure information sharing,
compared against those that did not offer pre-
TC technology.
PEI framework with policy, enforcement, and
implementation models. The framework helped
identifying possible TC applications that can support
secure information sharing.
Ager et al. (2006) developed a group of policy
based technologies that enable information
sharing across government agencies without
negotiating individual privacy and information
security.
Line-grained access controls, A adhesive policy ability
that supports joining of information from multiple sources
from the source’s original disclosure policies, disclosure
policies, item level security classification, and auditing
method that keeps track of information derivations over
time, addressed key information sharing problems in
government agencies.
Liu and Chetal (2005) suggested an innovative
information sharing protocol and interest based
trust model to resolve the issue of information
sharing across government agencies.
Integration of wide range of information policies with trust
negotiation, sharing data to be interdependent upon each
other, XML Web Services, for digital government.
Oberholzer et al. (2012) presented a
Hippocratic privacy protection framework
(HPP) that is based on the concept of privacy
contracting.
Prototype for protecting personal information to cooperate
organisations, decision criteria needed for privacy
protection, better control over their personal information
allowing process of transaction, efficacious model for
solving privacy problems.
Headayetullah and Pradhan (2009) proposed a
protocol capable of sharing secure information
between different government organisations for
the purpose of streamlining government
services.
Using the MD5 algorithm for data integrity, public key in
cryptosystem for secrecy and authentication, complex
mapping for agency identification, privacy preference and
information sharing based on trust level, trust based
protocol for sharing top secret information among
government intelligence agencies.
36
CHAPTER 3 : STUDY METHODOLOGY
This study proposes to use the design science approach to construct and develop a data
sharing application technology that is focused on values and principles of Hippocratic
database technology for managing disclosure data that can be incorporated into e-government
space. The task of safeguarding privacy in the latest information system is vital for system
users. The conventional method taken is to apply privacy policies at the application level by
issuing queries on the database thereby retrieving the result. The application then scans the
record set and then filters restricted information. But, this method leads to privacy beaches
when the same method is applied at the cell level. The use, trust and confidence of system
users depend heavily on the degree of privacy provided by the system and its platform. The
answer for the above-mentioned problems could be found when using Hippocratic database
principles.
3.1 Design Science Research
The research discipline of information systems comprises behavioural science research (BSR)
and design science research (DSR), which are complementary paradigms with the intention
of addressing the fundamental problems that face the productive application of information
technology (Hevner and Chatterjee 2010; Olugbara and Ndhlovu 2014). The goal of BSR is
truth and the goal of DSR is to seek and stretch the boundaries of human and organizational
proficiencies by constructing new and innovative artefacts. Truth tells a design whereas
utility informs theory that leads to where truth can be combined into the design (von Alan et
al. 2004). BSR is concerned with underlying theories that provide insights and inform
researchers about interactions amongst people, technology and organizations. On the other
hand, DSR addresses the fundamental problems of people and organizations through the
construction, utilization, and evaluation of artefacts, or systems that provide the utility to
transform an existing situation into a more preferred one (Olugbara and Ndhlovu 2014).
DSR enables the evaluation of the capabilities of the intended user, which will be the
government employees providing government services to the citizens, business or to other
government departments. This evaluation allows for the understanding of how government
departments process their data sharing and those services demanding data sharing capability
37
from other departments and to discover those factors that delay the process of data sharing. It
can be therefore concluded that the DSR method supports the realization of the research goals
and objectives that were put forward in this study. In the present research study, the DSR
method was applied to study how government departments in South Africa conduct their
daily business transactions, as well as to construct and evaluate the suitability of a Data
Integration Gateway (DIG) for Hippocratic data sharing in e-government space.
The modelling of a software artefact called DIG serves as a proof of concept of this
study. The object constraint language (OCL) and unified modelling language (UML) serve as
useful modelling tools in the application of DSR. The UML is widely accepted by industry
and academics for formal modelling and specification of software systems. It offers a
standard method to visualize the design of a software system. The OCL is a formal system
specification language within UML for defining the well-formed constraints and queries for
UML and OMG related meta models. It extends the UML by adding precise semantics to
visualize UML models. A modeller from a modelling approach must combine illustrative and
formal languages. Within the UML, the OCL is an additional language for UML. The OCL is
a universal standard for adding expressions that increase important information to object
oriented models. The DIG system is an innovative system, so UML and OCL are used
(Oberholzer et al. 2012). OCL has the features of a formal language, modelling language and
an expressive language that depend on the defined UML data types and thus contains some
facets of UML.
The DSR is a set of analytical and synthetic techniques for carrying out research in
information systems. DSR involves the creation of new knowledge through the design of
innovative artefacts. The analysis of the usage of such artefacts helps to understand and
improve the behaviour of features of information systems (Vaishnavi et al. 2004). These
artefacts enable individuals to implement information processing capabilities that move
organizations to achieve a set of desired goals (Baskerville et al. 2009). This study follows
the cognitive process (Figure 3.1) of the DSR model proposed by Vaishnavi et al. (2004).
The cognitive process groups the process steps into three groups, which are the abduction, the
deduction and the reflection abstraction.
In the cognitive process of DSR, the research begins by identifying the problem to solve,
which is also the awareness of the problem. Suggestions are made for the identified problem
such as how the problem should be solved and what resources are needed to solve the
problem. The problem solutions are drawn from the existing body of knowledge and an effort
is made to solving the problem creatively. The solution or group of solutions, which could be
38
an initial design, is constructed from the need requirements, followed by the design
specification and an artefact is developed. The partially or fully developed artefact is then
evaluated by comparing the functional requirements. This is an iterative phase where the
evaluation can go back to the development phase, suggestion phase and awareness of
problem phase. The flow from partial completion, going back to the awareness of the
problem is represented as the circumscription phase. The creative cognitive process of
abstraction and reflection are used in the conclusion phase, which specifies the termination of
the research cycle.
Figure 3.1 Design science research cycle (Vaishnavi et al. 2004)
The functional requirements for solving the problem of data sharing across
government departments were deduced from preliminary interactions with two South Africa
government departments, namely the Home Affairs (HA) and the South African Police
Service (SAPS) located in Durban of the KwaZulu-Natal province. The researcher examined
several official documents from both departments and interviewed staff from these
departments were also the end users, to pinpoint the research problem and to provide the
system requirements. Context-free interviews were used to gather the function requirements
of the DIG application. The use of context-free questions by the interviewer helped to avoid
prejudicing the response (Escalona and Koch 2004). The context-free interviews were then
39
analysed, brainstormed and converted into functional system requirements. The functional
requirements are necessary attributes in a system development lifecycle, which are narratives
that identify the capabilities, characteristics or quality factors of a system in order for the
system to give value and utility to end users (Sheikh et al. 2014). Some service quality
assessment models such as the analytic Kano model (Xu, Q et al. 2009) specifically suggest
early involvement of end users in functional requirements satisfaction measurement.
This study uses the DSR model (Vaishnavi et al. 2004; Baskerville et al. 2009) to
map the process steps involved in the development of the DIG system. The research problem
was tackled by following the phases as guided by the soft DSR methodology (Baskerville et
al. 2009):
a) Awareness of the problem:
Data sharing between government departments was identified as a major
problem for the slow delivery of public services.
Data sharing must be enabled to use the existing government databases and
infrastructures within each department and the devised solution must be cost
effective.
Data sharing within departments is considered highly confidential and is
secured within a department. Strict process, policies and rules are followed
when sharing data within government departments.
b) Suggestions:
The design of data sharing can be applied to any organization and for any
departments other than government organization. However, the confidentiality
of data is maintained through contracts or agreements of what must be shared,
and how and when the sharing should take place between the parties involved
in the transaction.
A centralised web application or an external agent system that can be used by
all departments for data sharing could ensure data security.
A lightweight web application using ASP.net web technology and a
lightweight database using SQL compact edition could be more suited to
create a workable instance of a solution that solves the data sharing research
problem.
40
c) Development:
The DIG functional requirements specification was written using UML-OCL
modelling language.
The DIG system prototype was developed using visual studio 2010 IDE, SQL
CE database and test driven development methodology.
d) Evaluation:
The evaluation of the DIG system was verified by test driven development and
manual system by the testers verifying against the functional requirements
specification.
e) Conclusion:
The DIG system developed in the research study is a workable, tested and
deployable solution that could be deployed to any government departments
that want to implement information sharing.
3.2 Hippocratic Data Sharing
Data or information sharing among governments and citizens are vital to any country
for speeding up the administration process (Harvey and Tulloch (2006). The government of
any country can become inefficient if the communication amongst the citizens and the
government breaks down abruptly because society can become unstable. Using the latest
technologies for communication, the connection between government and citizens can be
drastically improved. This communication problem between citizens and governments can be
better managed if the country is small, but for countries with large geographical areas and
massive populations management is very challenging. In some countries, there is a wide gap
between the rich and the poor communities and without efficient communication systems the
government is unable to effectively handle a good administrative system and the government
can lose control. Ndou (2004) states that fast development in information communication
technology (ICT) leads to widespread opportunities for proficient service delivery. Even with
the current advancement in technology that is secure and robust, most of the government
sectors have not fully explored the sharing of data methods because of the fear of data
41
sniffing or data leaks across the wires, when information is shared data out of the
departments.
The main competency which is needed for one-stop, connected, smart and networked
government that rapidly responds to vast needs of inter- and intra-departmental or
organizational needs for cross-national or inter-national needs are services such as data
sharing. However, to develop such proficient solution is very challenging and requires the
government to coordinate policies, share strategies and implement common frameworks
across its departments (Ebrahim and Irani 2005). Shared data services have been indicated as
a way of enhancing services to improve the efficiency of the service delivery and yet the
implementation of shared data services has proved to be difficult because of the operating
environments.
This research study originated from the identification of a research problem in the
government sector, regarding data sharing between government departments towards
improving service delivery. The sharing of data between government departments
hypothesizes the research problem as the central point of research and initiation of the
research process. The requirement of the main research problem is to search for a
technological solution framework that can effectively support data sharing amongst the
diverse government departments to ensure high level security and privacy. A more
demanding aspect of the solution is that data sharing must be possible without any massive
changes to the existing infrastructure and software applications. A holistic solution to these
challenges is the DIG, which is based on Hippocratic database principles. From a government
point of view, data will normally be published as a general privacy policy stating how the
data will be shared by departments.
In order to publish a common privacy policy, we propose customised and an
interactive manner of data sharing using the DIG system, with which the government
departments can connect and maintain its data contract policies. Primarily, the department
DIG administrator with other stakeholders of the department has to define all the data
contracts and publications in the DIG system so that the transactions and the data items that
are needed by every transaction can be processed into important information. The department
DIG administrator must also define the purpose of sharing data for each transaction and data
item and to whom the data should be shared. In addition, the definition of data contracts
follows the Hippocratic principles, which is applied to data to be shared and restricting
sensitive data.
42
The concept of Hippocratic databases (HDBs) was encouraged by the elementary
principles of Hippocratic oaths for the sole purpose of conserving secrecy and privacy in
information systems. HDBs contains a class of database system that accepts responsibility for
managing the security and privacy of data/information without hindering disclosure and
legitimate use (Grandison et al., 2008). HDBs guarantees to give authorization only to
authorized individuals and grants, direct access to sensitive data and that any revelation of the
data is only for used for authentic purposes. They empower individuals to consent to specific
uses and disclosures of their data and to verify the enterprise’s compliance with its privacy
policies (Grandison et al., 2008). HDBs use analytics and advanced data sharing methods to
enable enterprises to gain maximum value from data without negotiating individual privacy
or security.
The Hippocratic principles are implemented through the platform for privacy
preservation and role base access control model (Crépin et al. 2008). The DIG system
implements the ten Hippocratic principles, which are the following:
a) Purpose specification – the donor must know the purpose of sharing or restricting the
sensitive data stored in a database relation.
b) Consent – the donor must give informed consent to the data collected.
c) Restricted collection – indicates the minimal data collection required for the
understanding of the purposes.
d) Restricted use – this principle enforces policies on the database to use the gathered
data merely for a specific purpose.
e) Restricted disclosure – a database has to transfer the stored data just for the intended
purpose, with the donor’s approval.
f) Limited retention – information is available until the purpose of the utilization.
g) Accurateness – the accuracy of the data has to be enforced.
h) Safety – the safety of the data stored must be guaranteed.
i) Openness – all data are accessible which are shared.
j) Compliance – the donor of the data can at any point of time, verify the above
principles are respected.
3.3 Modelling of Data Sharing Gateway System
The main research aim of this study was to create a framework for data sharing across
government departments. The objective of this phase of modelling a data sharing gateway
43
was to understand the problem domain and constraints of the intended users. The
understanding of government department’s data sharing and the requirements gathering for
the DIG system was accomplished using the PaJMa model proposed by Chun et al. (2010).
The PaJMa model for structured approach to requirement gathering was originally generated
in the development of health information systems. For this research study and for the
development of the DIG system the, PaJMa model suited very well. The PaJMa model
increases the level of details in the requirements with the inclusion of non-functional
requirements, along with the identification of required practices, policies and metrics for the
requirements needed for the system. Chun et al. (2010) state that there are two type of
requirements that must be collected for a system development. These are functional and non-
functional requirements. The functional requirements are visible to the end user and the user
interacts with the system using the implemented function in the system. These functions must
be performed by the information system to capture and retain the user input into the system.
The world of information system depends on the scope of the information system and this
scope is defined through the functional requirements. The information system must contain
another type of requirement which is known as internal requirements for the system or the
non-functional requirements. The system’s internal requirements also known as non-
functional necessities are invisible to the end user and these are the functions that are internal
to the information system. This collection of features or software program requirements
define in what way the software program belonging to the information system must perform.
The collection of software program requirements is comprised of numerous governmental or
organizational structural processes, rules and policy based constraints that the information
system should strictly adhere to.
3.3.1 Objectives of the DIG Framework
The information gathered during the interactions with different government departments and
government service providers was for the development of a framework for information
sharing between government departments. The focus was primarily on the research problem
needs, not necessarily on any particular technology. The exercise in this research study leads
to the discovery of critical business processes and system requirements within the
government sector. The objectives of developing the robust framework for data sharing
between government departments are as follows.
44
a) To understand how the government services are delivered and the factors hindering
the speedy delivery to its citizens and businesses.
b) To implement a prototype system that enables government information sharing
securely between its departments through a web application with easy to use
interfaces.
c) To evaluate the efficacy of the implemented system for the government to share
information faster and securely between its departments.
In this phase of the DSR process, the objectives of the proposed DIG framework for
data sharing among government departments were identified and prioritized accordingly. The
high level framework for the DIG system is presented in Figure 3.2. The UML sequence
diagram for government inter-departmental communication based on the current scenario is
presented in Figure 3.3 and the UML sequence diagram for the government inter-department
communication after the implementation of the DIG system is presented in Figure 3.4.
3.3.2 High Level DIG Architecture
Figure 3.2 illustrates the high level technical architecture of the DIG system with the various
components on each system layer. The high level architecture shares the deployment and the
installation of software and hardware needed as well as the relationship among DIG system
components. The technical architecture of the DIG system is a web application (cloud based)
that resides within the government data centre to optimize the effort of delivering an instance
of the system to different government service providers. The DIG system is a 3-tier
architecture consisting of a lightweight Structured Query Language (SQL) Compact Edition
(CE) database, the middle service layer and the front-end interface which is a Silverlight web
application. Silverlight technology is a powerful development tool for designing and creating
appealing and interactive user experiences for mobile and web applications, and this
technology is supported by .NET framework from Microsoft. The layers of the DIG
architecture are the presentation layer, which is the User Interface (UI) layer, the business
logic layer and the data layer. The API layers talk to the Hippocratic data contract database
via the Hippocratic data contract database engine. The view data contract API uses the
Hippocratic data contract translation engine to formulate the data contract details and then
connects to the remote/intra department database to fetch the data thereby enabling data
interoperability across diverse government departments.
45
Figure 3.2: DIG system architecture
3.3.3 Managing Hippocratic Data Contract Policy
From a government department point of view, an assigned department’s Hippocratic data
contract administrator of the DIG system will normally publish a Hippocratic data contract
policy stating how the government department will handle the department’s information that
they wish to share. For publishing a general Hippocratic data contract policy, we put forward
a customised and an interactive solution using which a government department can create and
manage its Hippocratic data contracts. The department’s Hippocratic data contract
administrator defines all the transactions and data items that are needed for the Hippocratic
data contract via the DIG system. Once the Hippocratic data contract is added, the chief
46
Hippocratic data contract administrator verifies the Hippocratic data contract and approves
the publication.
Creation of the Hippocratic data contract metadata is made up of an automated script
that is run by the database administrator (DBA). The automated script installs the needed
relational tables and the prerequisite (master data) on the database used by the DIG system.
Any new metadata can be added on demand through the DIG system.
The features of the DIG system are represented using OCL. Using OCL we overcome the
limitations of UML when defining the detailed features of the DIG system design (Cabot et
al. 2012).
3.3.3.1 Manage Users
The context presented below inserts a new transaction in the user table in the DIG
system database. The user details will then be used to log into the DIG system.
context Transaction::addUser(
newUserId: Integer,
newUserName: String,
newPassword: String,
newRoleId: integer,
newIsAdmin: Boolean,
newIsLocked: Boolean,
newLoginExpiryDate: Date,
newEmailAddress: String,
newDepartmentID: Integer): Transaction
inv: self.User.UserId → isUnique(UserId)
def: newIsAdmin: Boolean = false
newIsLocked: Boolean = false
newLoginExpiryDate: Date = 365 days + sysdate
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newUserId)
post: self.transaction → includes(newUserId)
47
3.3.3.2 Mange Departments
The context presented below confirms a new transaction is added to the department table in
the DIG system database. The department details will be used by the DIG system for
participation in the data sharing.
context Transaction::addDepartment(
newDepartmentId: Integer,
newDepartmentName: String,
newLocation: String,
newFunction: String): Transaction
inv: self. Department.DepartmentId → isUnique(DepartmentId)
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newDepartmentID)
post: self.transaction → includes(newDepartmentID)
3.3.3.3 Manage Database Connections
The context presented below confirms a new transaction is added to the database connection
table in the DIG system database. The database connection details will be used by the DIG
system to connect to the remote databases in other departments and thus will enable data
sharing across departments.
context Transaction::addDatabaseConnection(
newDatabaseConnectionId: Integer,
newDatabaseServerName: String,
newDatabaseName: String,
newDatabaseLoginName: String,
new.DatabasePassword: String,
new.DatabaseConnectionString:String): Transaction
inv: self.DatabaseConnection.DatabaseConnectionID
→ isUnique(DatabaseConnectionID)
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newDepartmentID)
post: self.transaction → includes(newDepartmentID)
48
3.3.3.4 Manage Publications
The context presented below ensures a new transaction is added to the database publication
table in the DIG system database. The publication details will be used by the DIG system to
create the data contracts to share the data that will be accessed by the authorised DIG system.
context Transaction::addPublication(
newPublicationId: Integer,
newPublicationName: String,
newPublicationDataTable: String,
newAvaliableFields: String,
new.RestrictedFields: String,
new.DataFilter: String,
newDepartmentId:Integer): Transaction
inv: self. Publication.PublicationID → isUnique(PublicationID)
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newPublicationID)
post: self.transaction → includes(newPublicationID)
3.3.3.5 Manage Data Contracts
The context presented below confirms the addition of a new transaction the data contract
table in the DIG system database. The data contract details will be used by the DIG system to
access the published data by the departments to enable data sharing across government
departments.
context Transaction::addDataContract(
newDataContractId: Integer,
newPublicationId: Integer,
newDataContractName: String,
newDataContractTable: String,
newDataContractFields: String,
newDataContractTableFilter: String,
newDatabaseConnection: String,
newDataContractIsApproved:Boolean): Transaction
49
inv: self. DataContract.DataContractId → isUnique(DataContractId)
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newDataContractId)
post: self.transaction → includes(newDataContractId)
3.3.3.6 Manage Department Data Contract Access
The context presented below ensures an addition data to the department data contract access
table in the DIG system database. The department data contract access details will be used by
the DIG system to grant access to the data contracts to the users belonging to the assigned
departments.
context Transaction::addDepartmentDataContractAccess(
newDataContractId: Integer,
newDepartmentId:Integer): Transaction
inv: self.DepartmentDataContractAccess.DataContractIdDepartmentId
→ isUnique(DataContractId, DepartmentId)
3.3.3.7 Manage Audit Logs
The context presented below ensures that a new transaction is added to the audit log table in
the DIG system database. The audit log details is used by the administrator to monitor and to
check the activities of the DIG system.
context Transaction::addAuditLog(
newAuditLogId: Integer,
newUserName: String,
newSessionStartTime: Datetime,
newSessionEndTime: Datetime,
newModuleName: String,
newRole: String,
newAuditDate: DateTime,
newFunctionAccessed:String): Transaction
inv: self.AuditLog.AuditId → isUnique(AuditLogId)
pre: self.transaction → excludes(newAuditLogId)
50
newSessionStartTime:Datetime = sysdatetime
post: self.transaction → includes(newAuditLogId)
newSessionEndTime:Datetime = sysdatetime
3.3.3.8 Approve a Data Contract
The below presented context describes the process to activate a data contract.
context DataContract::approve(cDataContractId:Integer): Boolean
inv: self. references.verified = true
pre: self. DataContractIsApproved = false
post: self. DataContractIsApproved = true
3.3.4 Sequence Diagram for Inter Department Communication
The UML sequence diagrams for inter departmental communication between the DHA and
SAPS branch office are explained in this section.
3.3.4.1 Current Scenario
Government departs can be integrated in two ways for efficient communication, namely,
vertical and horizontal integration. Escalona and Koch (2004) defined vertical integration as
local and central governments that are integrated and therefore they can share functions and
services. Horizontal integration is the integration of government across all sectors that can
exchange functions and services. The application systems and the central database for each
department in most countries are vertically integrated. The government database of each
department resides at the government data centre. For example, all government offices
belonging to one department, irrespective of the location can access its own central database.
As shown in Figure 3.3, the DHA department across the country cannot directly access the
fingerprint data from SAPS for ID process of any person irrespective of the location.
Similarly, the SAPS department that generates fingerprint data cannot access the data
required to verify the fingerprint request that resides in the DHA department directly even
51
from the same location. The request for accessing fingerprint data has to go through the head
offices of DHA and SAPS from the local SAPS office. This is the cardinal cause of service
bureaucracy and delay in the current processes because the client has to wait for approval
until the data are verified. This process of client data verification takes up to two or three
weeks. Figure 3.3 shows the sequence diagram that models the interactions between the
objects of DIG system and the time ordering of those objects. The sequence diagram shows
the inter-department set up for four objects which are:
Branch office Home Affairs
Head office Home Affairs
Head office SAPS
Branch office SAPS
The head office of each administration has a centralized database and the branch
office reads and writes data to the centralized database. Branch offices of different
administrations can’t directly access each other’s head office data, thereby making data
sharing difficult. The request for data from one branch office to another head office is a 4 step
process. For example, as shown in the sequence diagram, if branch office Home Affairs
needs any data from head office SAPS then the sequence of the process is:
The Home Affairs branch office requests the needed info from SAPS head office to its
own head office.
The Home Affairs head office forwards this request to the SAPS head office.
The SAPS head office returns the data to Home Affairs head office.
The Home Affairs head office, then forwards the needed data to Home Affairs branch
office.
52
Figure 3.3: UML sequence diagram for inter department communication current scenario
3.3.4.2 Future Scenario with DIG system
The implementation and deployment of the DIG system can provide a direct interaction
between the Home Affairs branch office and SAPS head office as shown in Figure 3.4.
Similarly, the SAPS branch office can access data from the Home Affairs head office thereby
enabling inter-departmental communication.
53
Figure 3.4: UML sequence diagram for inter department communication with DIG
3.3.5 Meta Model Class Diagram for the DIG System
The UML class diagram and sequence diagrams are used to convert the knowledge model
into a specification model. All object classes and their relationships that are deduced from
UML models are implemented to give the software components of the system. The DIG
system presents eight classes and the relationships between the classes in the DIG system are
represented in the UML model. The interpretations of the six DIG relationships that exist
between classes are described as follows.
R1 – One department can have access to more than one data contract.
R2 – One department can have more than one user.
R3 – One publication can have more than one data contract.
R4 – Only one view can exist from one data contract.
ReturnInterDepartmentalDataFromSAPStoHomeAffairs()
ReturnInterDepartmentalDataFromHomeAffairs()
ReturnInterDepartmentalDataFromHomeAffairstoSAPS()
InterDepartmentalDataRequestfromSAPS()
InterDepartmentalDataRequestFromHomeAffairs()
ReturnInterDepartmentalDataFromSAPStoHomeAffairs()
54
R5 – One department can have more than one publication.
Figure 3.5: Data sharing gateway – UML meta model
3.3.6 Use Case Diagram for the DIG System
The relationship between the actors, functionality and the boundaries of the DIG prototype
system are shown by use cases. Escalona and Koch (2004) state that use case diagrams show
visually the functionality of the DIG prototype system. The use case diagrams of a system
and the relationship between the entities provides a great understanding of the system. The
high level functional requirements needed for the system as expected by the user can be
derived from the use case diagram. Figure 3.6 represents the use case diagram for the DIG
system.
55
Figure 3.6: Use case diagram for the DIG system
The functional requirements shown in Figure 3.6 have to be prototyped at this stage
using the DSR method. The users of the prototype and their roles (Salunke et al. 2013) are
shown in Table 3.1 and the main functions of the DIG system prototype are represented in
Table 3.2.
Table 3.1: Role and responsibility of the users
User Role and Responsibility
DIG System Administrator Data Contract Authorizer. This user is the overall
administrator of the system.
Department Administrator Data Contract Manger. This user created the data
contract of his department.
Data Contract Viewer Data Contract Visualizer. This user is the end user
who accesses the data contract as defined by the
system.
DIG System
Boundary
56
Table 3.2: Functions needed for the prototype development
Function Description
Manage Users This function created users who can access the system. The sub
functions like locking the user, changing password and setting up
the expiry of the logins forms the part of this function.
Define Department This function creates departments that wish to participate in the
information sharing using the system.
Manage Database Types and Connection
strings
This function defines the database type and the connection string
needed by the system. The database types in each department may
be diverse that the system should support.
View Data Contract This function allows the authorised users to view the defined data
contract across the government departments.
Approve/Disapprove Published Data
Contract
This function allows the DIG system administrator to approve or
disapprove the data contracts. Only the approved data contract can
be accessed by the authorized users.
View Audit Log This function enables the DIG system administrator to view the
activities done on the system.
The specification documentation involves the conversion of the UML use case
diagrams showed in Figure 3.6 into a prototype system. The prototype system for data
sharing across government departments requires the implementation of these specifications,
which must be then be coded to realise the DIG system (Satzinger et al. 2004). Figure 3.5
represents the UML class diagram (meta model) for the DIG system, which is the static
structure of classes and the relationship between them such as association, inheritance,
aggression and dependency.
3.3.7 Hippocratic Model on which the research is premised
Padma et al. (2009) demonstrated a Hippocratic postgreSQL architecture, which used an
extended SQL command along with the privacy facilities from both a terminal-based
interface and a web-based healthcare application. The Hippocratic postgreSQL architecture is
based on three key principles which are:
a) Privacy Policy Management – This feature requires extending the primary table with
an additional attribute that specifies the current policy associated with each data
owner.
b) Integrated Limited Disclosure – This feature ensures that any database access
complies with the active privacy policies stored in the ‘Privacy policy metadata’
tables and the owner preferences.
c) Integrated Limited Retention: This feature allows the data to be retained only as long
as necessary for the fulfillment of the purposes for which it was collected.
57
The DIG web application implements these key principles of the Hippocratic postgreSQL
model in the core data sharing engine to successfully enable secure data sharing across the
government departments using data contracts.
3.3.8 Prototype Evaluation
For the DSR study, the evaluation phase allows for testing Fan and Zhang (of the efficacy of
the soft DSR artefact in addressing the problem in the context in which it was established
(Crépin et al. 2008). The evaluation criteria and the limitation of the evaluation of the DIG
system is described in the evaluation phase in Chapter 4 of this dissertation. The relevance
and merits of the DIG system that will help seamless data sharing between government
departments is proved by the evaluation results. The stress is on demonstrating that the DSR
and this research study will produce a purposeful DIG system and a useful framework that
could solve real life problems in real situations (Wang and Hou 2010).
3.3.9 Dissemination
The dissemination phase focuses on communicating the extent to which the implementation
of the DIG system has addressed the research problem. The research problem is the entry
point, therefore the results of the research should clearly communicate if the research
problem was solved and the research objectives fulfilled. Additionally, the contributions of
the DSR artefact as it relates to the DIG system will be communicated to the relevant
knowledge domains. DSR not only focuses on producing innovative systems, but also on how
these systems will benefit those who will use them (Wang and Hou 2010). Hence the research
study should clearly provide contributions and disseminate them accordingly (Crépin et al.
2008). The research results, its contribution and the scope for further study are discussed in
Chapter 5.
3.9 Limitations
The popularity of the DSR research paradigm compared to other research paradigms in
information systems is low, but it is a valuable approach in information systems research.
Sahraoui (2007) states that there has been a slow adaptation and distribution of DSR in the
information system discipline in the last 15 years. The existing knowledge may be inadequate
58
for design purposes and therefore can force software designers to depend on intuition,
experience and experimentation approaches (Hevner et al 2004; Ellis and Levy 2010) to
produce innovative artefacts. This is why this study augments DSR with modelling tools and
languages such as UML and OCL. According to Crépin et al. (2008) one of the major
challenges of DSR is the overemphasis on the technological artefacts with the failure to
preserve an adequate theory base. These results are well-made artefacts that are not useful in
real life. Other challenges are related to the DSR solving a particular problem and applicable
only in the context of that problem (Hevner and Chatterjee 2010). For example, a model that
solves a particular problem in large organization may not necessarily be applicable to address
similar programs in small unstructured organizations (Juell-Skielse and Perjons 2009).
In this research study, the research method was a synergy between the DSR paradigm
and guidance from theoretical practices such as problem based research and contextual
research to get an in depth knowledge of the problem domain and setting of the intended DIG
system. This study does not justify the role of DSR in information system research, but
merely adopted it to shape the research study to produce reliable results and to follow an
accepted research method that involved thoroughness in the development and evaluation of
the DIG system. The lightweight web application framework could be criticized as a product
of software development exercise because both DSR and software development produces
software artefacts. The DSR process requires the use of rigorous accepted methods,
empirically testing of the artefact and communicating the results to contribute to the body of
knowledge (Sahraoui 2007; Crépin et al. 2008).
59
CHAPTER 4: PROTOTYPE SYSTEM EVALUATION
This chapter presents the prototype system evaluation of the Data Integration Gateway (DIG)
following design science research and Hippocratic database principles. The DIG application
facilitates seamless data sharing across different departments. The integration process pulls
data from different sources defined by data sharing contracts into a coherent view delivered
to the recipient. The purpose of conducting the DIG prototype system evaluation is to
legitimize the concrete idea behind its proposal. The DIG application proposes a central web
application framework that is accessible to different government departments that wish to
participate in data sharing collaboration. The prototype application is compatible with
different browsers and when invoked it connects to the backend database server that hosts the
DIG database. In addition, the DIG application offers the definition of data contracts that
apply the Hippocratic principles before data sharing can occur. The proposed approach for
data sharing between government departments takes place in real-time, whereas currently the
processing time of data requests by government departments can be anywhere from a few
hours to a few days depending on the transaction.
The implementation of the different components of the DIG application is discussed
in order to provide a clear view of the system evaluation task. This will be followed by the
introduction of the evaluation procedure, the presentation of evaluation metrics and
information on the evaluators. Simple scenarios are used to illustrate the efficacy of the
application. The evaluation covers the functions needed to seamlessly share data amongst the
government departments in a secure way using Hippocratic principles to enforce security
policies.
4.1 Prototype Implementation
This section presents the discussion on the implementation of the web application framework
called DIG in order to provide a proof of concept through a real life prototype system
implementation. The prototype system in action demonstrates the relevance of data sharing in
the e-government space. The prime goal of this research was to develop a central lightweight
web application framework for enabling seamless data sharing amongst government
departments in order to speed up the service delivery process. The varied functions provided
60
by the DIG application could be used by different government departments and can be
coherently integrated into their service delivery process. If any service is dependent on data
from any other government department, the DIG application can pull the data from that
source in real time. This mechanism reduces the time waiting to get the needed information
from other departments, which in turn speeds up the service delivery process of government.
The DIG prototype system provides the related management functionalities such as
managing user login, database connection, defining department, data contract, data contract
authorization and data contract visualization. The DIG application merely serves as a channel
for exchanging data reliably between government departments. An inherent merit of the
application is that no data from government departments are stored anywhere in the DIG
application. The DIG application only stores the authorized user and data contract
information for accounting purpose. Another potential merit of the prototype system is that it
is relatively easy to use and it accommodates basic users with low literacy levels. Users can
easily view the data exchanged using the data visualization function and skilled users who
can manage the data contract and other administrative functions can find the system
appealing.
The design of the prototype system took into cognisance the context of the working
environment of government departments, data ownership, data security, and hardware
infrastructure and software technology constraints. The system aims to improve efficiency in
delivering government services, foster accountability, minimize duplication of data across
government departments and promote openness and transparency in government departments
when it comes to efficient service delivery process. The implementation of the DIG
application is through the design science approach, incorporating Hippocratic database
principles to enforce data security. The application is cloud enabled because its database
server resides on the cloud to be able to hold huge volumes of data as often experienced in
government space.
Cloud computing has been defined as the aggregation of computing utility and
software services located in data centres offsite where the applications are delivered over the
internet as needed (Fernando et al. 2013). Cloud computing is the latest computing paradigm
that adds capabilities to conventional computer without the need of investing in new
hardware or infrastructure, licensing a new software, or having to train the system user.
Cloud computing provides shared online business applications that can be accessed using a
web browser or any other client devices, that runs the software and data stored on the shared
web/database servers. Cloud computing extends the functionalities of web applications into
61
services. A web application is a distributed client-server system. The web application uses, a
web browser which provides the user interface. The server and client exchange messages
using the HTTP/HTPPS request and response protocols (Rewatkar and Lanjewar 2010).
In this study the front-end of the DIG application was implemented using the
Microsoft Silverlight technology and framework for Windows Communication Foundation
(WCF) (MicrosoftDeveloperNetwork 2014a; MicrosoftDeveloperNetwork. 2014b). The
Silverlight technology is a cross-platform, cross-device and cross-browser plugin technology
for providing the next generation of “.NET” framework based rich interactive and user
experiences applications for the Web (LI et al. 2009). The WCF is Microsoft’s unified
computer programming model for creating and building a rapid service oriented applications
(McMurtry et al. 2006; Skonnard 2006). The back-end database was implemented using the
Microsoft Structured Query Language Compact Edition (SQL CE) lightweight database
technology. Microsoft SQL CE is a database engine designed for mobile and embedded
applications that run efficiently and that require less resources (Seshadri and Garrett 2000).
In the DIG application, the mechanism for sending and receiving data from the server
to the client is handled through the WCF services. The applications, build with WCF can
communicate across the web and the enterprise applications (Meier et al. 2009). The WCF is
the layer between the Silverlight client application and the SQL CE database server (Kamran
and Haas 2011). The WCF service works asynchronously and supports all type of protocols,
namely named pipes, Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), http/https, Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) and it can be hosted on self-hosting applications, Internet Information Server
(IIS) and Windows Application Service (WAS). As already emphasised, the definition of the
data contract defined in the DIG system does not store any data from government
departments. The data contract only stores the necessary information to fetch the data from
the publisher and seamlessly transport the data to the subscriber and the necessary security as
well as connection information. So the lightweight SQL CE database with the WCF services
fits in appropriately as technologies that can handle the data contract needed by the DIG
system.
4.2 Evaluation Components
This section provides a description of the components of the DIG application that were
evaluated in this study following the DSR approach. The DSR evaluation process focuses on
the validity of a system in regard to changing the user requirements to preferred states. The
62
DIG application may be deemed inappropriate when it does not present any real value for
practical usage. However, the application may be regarded as complete and effective when it
satisfies the intended requirements within the constraints of the problem being solved. The
DSR evaluation process can be carried out in two main forms, namely, a naturalist and an
artificial setting evaluation (Olugbara and Ndhlovu 2014). An artificial evaluation is
conducted in a non-realistic setting and uses methods such as laboratory experiments and
simulations (Baskerville et al. 2009). A laboratory evaluation allows for more control over
the testing scheme and reduces the costs of experimentation. However, it lacks the
pragmatism of user interaction because it does not simulate the real context of users and lacks
the desired ecological validity of user settings (Kallio and Kaikkonen 2005). A naturalistic
evaluation involves observing the performance of a system in a real user setting and engages
the actual users in identifying real system problems.
The literature posits that a system can be evaluated from an ex-ante and/or ex-post
perspective. An ex-ante perspective means system evaluation prior to implementation and ex-
post perspectives means system evaluation after implementation (Baskerville et al. 2009).
Evaluation of the DIG application follows an ex-post naturalist pattern, using DSR principles
to explore how real users react to the application in a natural context (Helfert and Donnellan,
2012). By considering all the above arguments, the DIG application was evaluated by
observing its actual operation in a field experiment. This approach allowed for the acceptance
of all the complexities of human behaviour in real life settings, against specified evaluation
methods and realistic expectations (Baskerville et al. 2009). The choice of the right
evaluation method was critical for research of this nature and was influenced by the fact that
real users are from varied contextual backgrounds and settings. This made it, therefore,
imperative to establish the validity of the evaluation in a user context (Cleven et al. 2009).
The ex-post naturalist evaluation was conducted on the basis of different system components.
A component wise evaluation offers an advantage over a whole system evaluation because it
allows each important aspect of the application to be fully comprehended and validated
against its functional requirements. The “.net” framework and the Silverlight design patterns
(El-Bakry and Mastorakis 2009) helped to provide simple and easily accessible system
component workflows.-
63
4.2.1 Manage Login
The DIG system requires users from participating departments to register with user names
and passwords for authentication purposes. A user authentication is required for the DIG
system users to gain access for using the application on their web browsers as shown in
Figure 4.1. This is the fundamental requirement of most web applications to allow user access
by authorization. The application will then authenticate the user and load the main interface
of the application to allow the department user to perform specific data integration
transactions such as viewing or defining a data contract. The system allows the user to
complete as many transactions as possible without delays and deviation from transactions to
enable data integration.
Figure 4.1: “DIG Login” screen
The user with a data contract authorization role can manage the logins for the DIG
application. It is possible to use the “Manage Login” component to “Create Login”, “Edit
Login” and “Delete Login” for a user as shown in Figure 4.2. This figure portrays the main
components of the DIG application such as “Manage Login”, “Define Department”, “Manage
Connection Strings”, “Authorise Contract” and “View Audit Log”.
64
Figure 4.2: “Manage Login” screen
The “Create Login” or “Edit Login” components pop up a similar screen that allows
for the required input to be captured and saved. The required inputs such as user name, secret
password, expiry date for the login to the DIG system, the user role, email address and
department that are required areas are shown in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3: “Create Login” or “Edit Login” screens are similar to each other
65
4.2.2 Define Department
The administrator can “Create Department”, “Edit Department” and “Delete Department”
according to the departments that wish to participate in the data sharing collaboration using
the DIG system. The information such as department ID (unique identifier for a department),
department name, department function and location are captured and stored in the DIG
application as shown in Figure 4.4.
Figure 4.4: “Define Department” screen
The department’s system administrator can edit the department details that are defined
by the DIG system administrator if needed. The “Define Department” component also allows
the department administrator to publish the data contracts for the department using the
“Create Publication” functionality as shown in Figure 4.5.
66
Figure 4.5: “Create Department” screen
The department system administrator can create the data contract and publish it to
facilitate data sharing transactions using the “Create Publication” functionality as shown in
Figure 4.5. This functionality allows the administrator to test the connection using the “Test
Connection” function and to verify the validity of the publication before publishing it to the
DIG system. The preview of the data that will be shared is also supported using the “Data
Preview” function. The DIG system will enable the “Data Preview” when the test connection
verifies the connection for valid publication data, as shown in Figure 4.6.
67
Figure 4.6: “Create Publication” contract screen
The “View Data contract information” functionality of the “Define Department”
component of DIG application is accessible to “Data Contract Manager” role specified by the
system. If the user has only “Data Contract Visualizer” role then the user can access the
“View Data Contract Information” screen only. This screen shows all the data contracts
approved by the DIG system administrator and to the data contracts to which the Data
Contract Visualizer” role has access to as shown in Figure 4.7.
68
Figure 4.7: “View Data Contract Information” screen
Selecting the data contract and then clicking on the “View Data” button brings up the
data contract preview screen shown in Figure 4.8. The “View Data Contracts” screen has a
print preview tab where you can preview the data before printing. This screen also has a data
filter text box where data can be filtered before printing.
69
Figure 4.8: “View Data” screen
4.2.3 Manage Connection String
The user with the role of “Data Contract Authoriser” who is the DIG system administrator of
the DIG system can define the type of databases that the DIG system can support (Figure 4.9)
along with its corresponding connection strings (Figure 4.10). The connecting string formats
will be later used when defining the data contracts by the department system administrator.
70
Figure 4.9: “Manage Connection String” screen
Figure 4.10: “Create Connection String” screen
4.2.4 Authorise Contract
The DIG system administrator can “Approve” or “DisApprove” the published data contracts
by the department administrator using authorise contract functionality. Only the approved
data contracts will be visible to the users with the “Data Contract Visualiser” role. This
mechanism enforces security control at multiple levels, including who has access to create
data contracts and who has access to approve the sharing of the published data contracts.
Figure 4.11 shows the data contract authorisation screen.
71
Figure 4.11: “Authorise Contract” screen
4.2.5 View Audit Log
The DIG system administrator can check the activities on the DIG system using the “View
Audit Log” function as shown in Figure 4.12.
72
Figure 4.12: “View Audit Log” screen
The DIG system administrator can also search for a specific audit log using the
“Search Audit Log” function. This function allows the DIG system administrator to search
for a date range or for a specific text value as shown in Figure 4.13.
Figure 4.13: “Search Audit Log” screen
73
4.3 Evaluation Constructs
The evaluation of the performance of the DIG application is based on user interaction and
system usability constructs, which are two important measures for system evaluation
(Harrison et al. 2013; Olugbara et al. 2010; Zaharias and Poylymenakou 2009; Johnson and
Yang 2009; Theofanos and Scholtz 2005; Scholtz and Consolvo 2004). Interaction is defined
as how evaluators and systems function cooperatively taking into account that devices in the
computing environment can be more dynamic than static (Scholtz and Consolvo 2004).
Usability is the level to which a system can be used by users to achieve the needed goals with
satisfaction , efficiency and effectiveness in a definite context of use (Nayebi et al. 2012).
The success of application of the DIG system focuses on the overall user experience during
the interactions and evaluations.
The ability of the system evaluators to correctly respond to the measurable statements
was measured using a five-point Likert scale. A response score of 5 indicates “strongly
agree”, and a response score 1 indicates “strongly disagree”. An average response score of 2
indicates “disagree”, a response score of 3 indicates “somewhat agree” and a response score
of 4 indicates “agree”. Table 4.1 shows the constructs with their corresponding evaluation
statements or measures.
74
Table 4.1: DIG system evaluation constructs and statements
N
o.
Description of Interaction Statement
M
01
I am able to access the system only when my details are correctly specified.
M
02
I am allowed to log into the system with password validations and the system logs me out after the task
is complete, if I do not explicitly log out.
M
03
Only the Users that have been authorised can access the published in for.
M
04
The system speed and response to fetch the data contract data is satisfactory.
M
05
The system responded to the specified login authorization and the data contracts linked to the user and
department.
M
06
The system exposes only the published data based on the available and restricted data fields from the
data source.
M
07
Auditing is enabled for monitoring, in compliance with Hippocratic principles and privacy policies
covering security and privacy.
M
08
The system tracks all the accessed data for what purpose and by whom, the time of access and the
changes made.
Description of Usability Statement
M
09
I understand the information required of me to access the system.
M
10
The system maintaining my privacy preferences.
M
11
The system only publishes only the information that I allow.
M
12
The system allows the publishing of my information only when authorised.
M
13
Once the data content is published, the data contract cannot be altered. Data contract belongs to the
Data contract authorizer.
M
14
Only the non-restrictive data items can be used for Data contracts.
M
15
The system enables the linking privacy laws using Hippocratic principles and regulations relating to a
data contract and its data items based on the logins.
M
16
The system runs on all popular internet browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and
Opera.
4.4 System Evaluators
This study used 16 system evaluators as hosting the system in the ‘cloud’ and the time of the
professional testers had a cost implication. The 16 evaluators used the DIG system on
different browsers with preloaded data bundles. Table 4.2 reveals the distribution of the
system evaluators, who were all professional testers from a software development company
in Durban, South Africa. The system evaluators were trained to acquaint themselves with the
basic functions of the DIG system. It was easy to communicate the functionalities of the DIF
application to the evaluators because of their experience working with web applications. The
system evaluators were specifically instructed to perform the following basic tasks using the
DIG application:
a) Manage database types of connection strings.
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b) Publish a data contract.
c) View a data contract.
d) Manage users.
e) Define departments.
f) Approve or disapprove published data contracts.
g) View audit log.
Table 4.2: Distribution of system evaluators
Title Years of Experience No. of Testers
Test Analyst 8-10 4
Senior Testers 6-8 6
Testers level 1 and 2 4-6 6
4.5 Evaluation Procedure
The evaluation of a software system is the set of activities used to determine if the system
under examination meets the design requirements and to verify if the performance of the
system satisfies the usability needs of the end users. While it is important in the application of
DSR methodology to prove the usefulness of a system, a rigorous DSR evaluation procedure
requires justifying the evaluation settings and validating the system design before it is put to
practical use (Sonnenberg and vom Brocke 2012). Karmokar et al. (2013) proposed a user-
centred procedure in design science research based on the Pries-Heje et al. (2008) conceptual
framework and applied the procedure for the evaluation of a website. The evaluation
procedure begins by asking some pertinent self-report measures that afford the evaluators the
opportunity for deeper cogitation. Moreover, self-report measures are the valid and cost
effective ways to collect information from the people (Glasgow et al. 2005). The self-report
measures for the evaluation of the DIG application as suggested by Karmokar et al. (2013)
and Pries-Heje et al. (2008) are the following:
a) What is being evaluated? In the case of this study, it is the data integration gateway
design product.
b) How is it being evaluated? In the case of this study, it is through laboratory
experiments.
c) When is it being evaluated? In the case of this study, it is ex-post naturalist using
software professionals to voice their opinions about the system.
d) Who is evaluating it? In the case of this study, the evaluators are professional
software testers and analysts.
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The most critical response to these four evaluation measures or questions is the how
question (Karmokar et al. (2013). The DIG system was evaluated using two methods, which
are user task analysis and unit testing as shown in Table 4.3. This follows the
recommendation in the literature to use multiple methods to evaluate a system (Karmokar et
al. 2013). The user task analysis was used to evaluate interactivity and usability of the DIG
system. The interaction evaluation was aimed at exploring the extent to which the DIG
system provided the required feedbacks to users to successfully complete the intended data
integration transactions without much rigour. The system usability is aimed at creating a
system such as the DIG to ensure that it is usable with low learning overhead. The system
evaluators were asked to express their opinion on the interactivity and usability of the DIG
system using the data collection instrument in Table 4.1.
Table 4.3: Evaluation Methods Used in this Study
Evaluation Method Goal of Evaluation
User Task Analysis To test the human interaction, usability and functionality of the DIG system.
Unit Testing
To test the functionality, quality and code coverage at a component level. This is
crucial as not all the code within the system can be evaluated with the usability
test. The code related bugs can be easily identified by unit testing.
The DIG system was evaluated for quality and fulfilment of the system requirements
using the software automated testing procedure. Sang et al. (2009) state that to test if the
implemented software and its functionalities fit into the specification requirements as drafted
by the analyst or the system innovator (the researcher in this case), a validation process is a
mandatory task. The process of validation is an important step that must be a part of the unit
test case design. For systems based on object oriented design, the process of validation is
particularly germane. Khan et al. (2010) and Benli et al. (2012) argue that to test software
requires a lot of resources including manpower and equipment, therefore this study
implemented a unit testing procedure with the aid of NUnit tool in Microsoft Visual Studio to
speed up the testing process. Tillmann et al. (2010) states that unit testing is an important and
valuable means of improving software reliability and in recent years, it’s been widely
recognized in the industry, as it exposes bugs early in the software development life cycle. It
is necessary to test all the individual software components separately instead of a whole
system to make testing more robust and scalable. Wahid and Almalaise (2011) state that
when it comes to testing procedures, unit testing plays a major role to test the source code to
find out if it is fit for use and to confirm that the code fulfills its design and behaves as
anticipated. Hwang et al. (2004) posit that unit testing has become so obvious and essential in
77
today’s software development that there exist a number of software development frameworks
to aid unit test writing, maintaining and running computer codes.
4.6 Evaluation Results
The empirical results of the prototype DIG system evaluation, using descriptive statistics
were based on the findings of user task analysis (interaction testing and usability testing) and
unit testing. The user task analysis questionnaire was formulated for the DIG application
based on the key evaluation criteria shown in Table 4.1. is the results are presented in Figure
4.14, showing the mean of response measures against the 16 evaluation measures for the
extent of interactivity and usability provided by the DIG system. In Figure 4.14 the usability
testing results are plotted on the positive vertical axis, while the interaction testing results are
plotted on the negative vertical axis for easy interpretation. A similar reporting approach for
usability testing experiments was used in the usability analysis of a mobile recommender
system (Olugbara et al. 2010). The user interaction analysis results show a consistent increase
in all responses with a minimum mean value of 3.200 (standard deviation of 0.696) and
maximum mean value of 3.930 (standard deviation of 0.463).
This result generally means that evaluators responded above the mean score of 2.5 on
the measurement scale. The minimum mean value for user interaction occurred for measure
M02, which is the user interaction for logging into the DIG system. The maximum mean
value of 3.93 occurred for the statement M04 for the DIG system to fetch and return the data
based on the user’s request for viewing the data contract. This result means that evaluators
found the process of data request contract and viewing as implemented by DIG more
interactive and that of “log in” to be less interactive. This result was expected as users are
more familiar with the “log in” system for most web applications. The result of the DIG
system usability also shows a consistent increase above the mean score of 2.50 on the
measurement scale. The minimum value of 3.270 (standard deviation of 0.600) for measure
M11, which is the measure for the DIG system allowing only the information that the
administrator allowed for publishing. The maximum value of 3.880 (standard deviation of
0.517) was recorded for the M09 measure, which means that the DIG system users
understand the required information to access the system, hence it is usable.
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Figure 4.14: Mean of user interaction and system usability measurements
The unit testing evaluation of the DIG system was carried out using the unit testing
mechanism implemented in the Microsoft NUnit. Tillmann et al. (2010) state that unit testing
has been widely recognized as a valuable means of improving software reliability, as it
exposes bugs early in the software development life cycle. Moreover, it is desirable to test
individual software components in isolation to make the overall system more robust and
scalable. Benli et al. (2012) points out that software testing is generally an expensive, ad hoc
and unpredictable process, which requires a better process. Performing unit testing can help
minimize the expensiveness of a testing procedure as it becomes simpler to manage short
codes than to manage bulky ones. Wahid and Almalaise (2011) state that unit testing plays
significant role in testing procedure to determine if the source code is fit for use to ensure that
code meets its design and behaves as intended. Hwang et al. (2004) mention that unit testing
has become so evident and crucial in today’s software development that there are a number of
unit testing frameworks to assistance unit test creation, maintaining and for execution.
The researcher chose to apply the NUnit unit testing framework which is well
recognized in the developer community and software industry. There are other competing
unit testing frameworks in existence such as MS Test and JUnit, but NUnit was used since it
is recommended for Microsoft c# language “.Net” framework and the researcher is
conversant with it. Figure 4.15 shows the results of the unit testing experiment with the DIG
system. The results show that all the test cases related to the components within the DIG
system passed the litmus test successfully. The unit testing was conducted for both success
and failure criteria such as invalid passwords. The unit test ran through all the codes in the
79
DIG system and discovered any bugs buried in the code. The execution time of the
components in the DIG system is also shown in Figure 4.15. The average timing for
execution of the code was 588 milli seconds, which reveals that the DIG system is robust and
error free.
Figure 4.15: DIG application evaluation using unit tests with passed test case
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CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
This chapter discusses the summary of findings of this study with respect to the development
of a data integration gateway that can help facilitate data sharing. The discussion of the study
findings also covers reflections on the lessons learnt through the research process. In
addition, the chapter summarizes the study benefits and suggests recommendations for future
work. The suggested recommendations are based on the outcomes of the experience of
implementing the DIG system and the design science based evaluation of the implemented
system. The chapter concludes by highlighting the reflections and lessons learnt by the
researcher throughout the diverse stages of the study.
5.1 Summary of the Study
This study explored data sharing as an e-service within the e-government domain in the
context of the South Africa system. Previous authors have seen e-service as a core component
of the e-government system delivered through the internet because it bridges the intrinsic gap
between the government administrators and citizens (Kaaya 2004; Misuraca et. al. 2011). The
overarching goal of this study was to develop a web application that is based on Hippocratic
database principles to support seamless sharing of data in e-government space. The research
objectives have been met in order to achieve the goal of this study:
a) To enable seamless data sharing across diverse government departments without any
changes to the existing system infrastructure.
This objective was met through the development and evaluation of a data integration
gateway (DIG) that could facilitate seamless data sharing without additional costs to
the existing infrastructure. The DIG is able to integrate data from diverse sources and
deliver the result to the requester that have been permitted by contract agreement to
access parts of the data.
b) To control the volume of data sharing more securely across government departments
using a coherent contract management technique implemented according to
Hippocratic database principles.
This objective was realized through the contract management policy implemented in
the DIG system that was developed in this study. The gateway is able to restrict data
81
sharing to parts that are specified by the contract agreement policy. This implies that it
is not essential to transport the entire database or data file across the network for the
specific sub-data requested.
c) To reduce the time delay often experienced during cross verification of data involved
in government services.
This objective was met because data requested from one government department can
be automatically shared using the DIG system for the departments that are involved in
the data contract agreement. If data are automatically accessed from the sources
without intermediary, it is possible to improve the processing time that will eventually
improve service delivery efficiency.
d) To maintain a high level of consistency when data are shared across government
departments.
This objective was met because using the DIG system, multiple data entries at
different sources can be avoided. The department that hosts a particular database can
share it with other departments participating in the data sharing contract agreement.
e) To eliminate the storage of duplicate data across government departments by sharing
the data from the source of truth.
This objective was intrinsically met because DIG system eliminates the need to keep
multiple sources of truth. If a database resides in a particular department, its contents
can be effectively and efficiently shared across all other departments that agree to
participate in the data sharing collaboration.
The DIG could be touted as a data sharing tool that could contribute to effective
means of achieving data interoperability within the e-government space. Previous authors
have mentioned that data sharing in government space will contribute to eliminating errors
inherent from manual procedures, and eliminate duplication of data thereby decreasing the
time needed for transactions (Ndou (2004). Efficiency is also achieved by streamlining the
internal process by enabling more informed and faster decision making and by speeding up
transaction procession. Gianluca et al. (2011) argue that there are still challenges with the
interoperability dimension of governance openness within e-government space and propose
that interoperability contributes a lot to the delivery of e-government services to local and
national organizations within the European Union. Solving data interoperability problems
adequately will allow any two or more organisations or departments to exchange and
understand information where there are hardware and software issues (Guijarro 2007). This
will also allow two or more organisations or departments to exchange data where the
82
structure and content of the exchanged data are different, but the information is correctly
traded (Gugliotta et al. 2005). In codicil, it will allow two or more organisations or
departments to engage in an effective exchange of information, data and services through the
adoption of best practices supported by an appropriate framework (Scholl and Klischewski
2007).
5.2 Benefits of Data Integration Gateway
The data integration gateway (DIG) is a web based system that enables seamless data sharing
across government departments by providing data contracts in place and by enforcing
security standards for defining and sharing data. The DIG system can work with any type of
the existing relational databases and is compatible across any web browser. The DIG system
works on user based and role based authentication mechanisms. The communication across
government departments are through secure protocols. The web application and the database
that hold the data contracts and connection information reside at the secure government data
centre. The DIG system administrator can track the activities that are taking place in the DIG
system. The published data contracts are transparent and once published, all the authorised
users can access the data contracts. The DIG system connects the vertically integrated system
horizontally.
This in turn breaks the existing barriers where communication between vertically
integrated systems is not possible. As a result, intra- and inter-department communications
are made easy using the DIG system. There is efficient delivery of services where there is
inter-dependency between the departments. The DIG system can integrate existing
applications and databases in government departments and enables communication between
them making the practicality of seamless data sharing a reality. This implies that no changes
to the existing infrastructure in government departments are needed. A very low investment is
needed to host the DIG system at the data centre. Making the service delivery faster by
enabling data sharing between government departments encourages citizens to trust the
government. The DIG system eliminates the duplication and inconsistency of data across
government departments which also creates trust between government and citizens. The top
officials in the government are already under pressure for slow delivery of government
services. With a system such as the DIG that is efficient, robust and cost effective, the
support from the top management should be easily obtained.
83
The DIG system addresses the service delivery issues faced by the South African
government to reach their vision of e-government 2020. To fulfil the vision of South African
government’s e-government 2020, which is to bring the existing manual services online
through web and internet, data sharing across government departments must be in place first.
Secondly, a massive change in existing hardware infrastructure and software systems in the
government space needs to occur to provide the latest internet technologies to support the
online web services that can support the South African government’s vision of e-government
2020. The DIG system is cross-platform, cross-browser and can support most of the different
types of databases used in the government sector, thereby promoting technological
interoperability. The DIG system can support most of the different types of databases used in
the government sector. When the data contract is properly defined and transformed,
information can be correctly exchanged between diverse government departments. The
process and procedure to exchange data or information between government departments are
clearly supported by the functions implemented in the DIG system. The interoperability
provided by the DIG system allows any number of government departments to participate in
the data or information sharing to enable more effective intra- and inter-departmental
communication.
The development of the DIG system was based on the design science research
hypothesis, which seek out to increase the limits of organizational and human competencies
by generating new, innovative and purposeful systems. The contributions of design science
research are in the collective innovation and usefulness of the developed systems that enable
the understanding and creation of useful information systems in the organizations (Hevner et
al. 2004). The contributions of the systems are valued with respect to their capability to
increase performance in the growth and use of information systems (March and Storey,
2008). The DIG system developed and reported in this dissertation contributes to design
science research as well as the ICT knowledge domain and satisfies the following
requirements:
a) Convenient – the language based on contract management policy was borrowed from
Hippocratic database principles for specifying data of interest is intuitive, simple and
user friendly.
b) Preservation – enforcing data privacy policies through a set of contract agreement
policies do not require any changes to the existing database systems managing the
source databases.
84
c) Persistency – data privacy policies are created, managed and stored as contracts in an
external database that is private to the gateway.
d) Protection – contents of source databases are not altered, no data write access given to
the gateway and data read by the gateway from the source databases are not stored in
the database maintained by the gateway, but such data are delivered to the requesters
as portable files.
The potency of the Hippocratic data sharing approach being proposed in this study is
built on two technical properties. Primarily it supports field and record level data privacy
enforcement policies. Next, it permits full use of the standard structured query language
(SQL) query proficiencies to express policies for seamless data sharing. In more detail, the
contributions of the research reported in this dissertation are:
a) The investigation of an approach for a seamless Hippocratic sharing of data
maintained by different heterogeneous information systems with specific reference to
the e-government space.
b) The examination of several implementation issues of a seamless Hippocratic data
sharing technique, including secure metadata storage, efficient query formulation
policies and data structure for the storage of contract information.
c) The experimental evaluation of the proposed application shows that the data sharing
approach has low overhead and speeds up data sharing and information verification
time.
The DIG system therefore presents a potential framework to solve some of the
existing challenges of disconnected government systems which exist in most developing
countries. The DIG system provides the envisaged benefits for the government which are
enunciated as follows:
a) Enables seamless data sharing across diverse government departments without any
changes to the existing infrastructure and software applications.
b) Controls the volume of information sharing more securely using data contracts with
Hippocratic principles among diverse government departments.
c) Reduces the time delay and the dependencies across government departments during
cross verification of data involved in government services.
d) Maintains a high level of consistency when data are shared across government
departments.
e) Eliminates the storage of duplicate data across government departments by sharing the
data from the source of truth.
85
f) Delivers services at acceptable speeds.
g) Aligns government’s political and delivery mandates using technology.
h) Develops and implements immediate and interim measures to support and secure the
IT environment of the government.
5.3 Future Work
Implementation of the DIG system would provide a methodology and foundation upon which
to apply design science research to improve data sharing in innovative ways and thereby
improve the efficiency of service delivery in government departments. The evaluation of the
DIG system by means of this study anchors the validity and reliability of the criteria applied.
The DIG system could effectively contribute to millions of citizens and businesses in
developing countries by speeding up service delivery. This system is cost-effective to
implement and can support the existing infrastructure and databases in government
departments. The research results provide relevant insights to extend the concept of data
sharing in the government sector for future research and can be extended to apply data
contracts and Hippocratic principles for mobile cloud services. Ndou (2004) states that with
the rapid technological changes in ICT and availability of new technologies, government
sectors can create extensive opportunities to rethink the way that services are delivered in the
public and government sectors. Cost effective, robust, secure and freely available ICT
solutions can be developed to bring communication and collaboration between the
government, citizens and the businesses together. The pervasiveness of mobile devices means
that citizens demand new ways of conducting businesses and interacting with government
directly by using government services online.
Future work can look at mobile data sharing within the e-government space to support
the emerging open government initiative. The emergence of mobile phones, wireless
technologies and hand held devices with sophisticated features and powerful computing is
creating the demand for all governments to provide mobile, open and smart government.
Reffat (2003) raises an important point about the latest improvements in mobile and wireless
communications and states that it is becoming easier for the governments to provide and
manage services to its citizens efficiently and cost effectively using advanced solutions
through the mobile. The usage of internet using the mobile phones is increasing faster than
desktop usage and is likely to continue in this direction in the future. The next generation of
e-government services will mainly be consumed on mobile devices, so the government are
86
now forced to provide the e-government service via mobile which is referred to m-
government (Almarabeh and AbuAli 2010). To fulfil the mobile government requirements
and to support other hand held devices governments around the world must publicize and
make available government services using web/cloud services that are efficient, compatible,
secure, and interoperable so that the web services can be consumed by various third party
applications. The application of Hippocratic principles and the concept of the data contract
can also be applied to government web/cloud service architecture, requiring user
authentication for access to the web service. Future work can research issues regarding data
integration, sharing and interoperability for the smart government initiative.
5.4 Concluding Remarks
To conclude, this dissertation developed a data integration gateway based on Hippocratic
database design principles to facilitate seamless sharing of data across government
departments that wish to participate in collaborative data sharing. In this dissertation, the
necessity of data sharing is well documented and how this mechanism can help to improve
government service delivery process is detailed. Firstly, considering the importance of data
sharing as a way of improving service delivery in the government departments, this study can
conclude that in the case of the South African e-government implementation framework, the
need to have a system such as a data integration gateway in place to help facilitate service
delivery process is absolutely vital. Secondly, and most importantly, the need to control how
data should be shared within the e-government space to enforce security policy is critical to
the successful application of a data integration gateway. The interplay between accessibility
to crucial government information is associated with levels of data integration and sharing
that occur at government departments. This helps to explain how government departments in
South Africa could adopt ICT in their future data sharing collaboration. Thirdly, this study
presents evidence in line with previous studies that data sharing can be challenged through a
design science system construction.
This study emphasises that ICT development should be based on a clear
understanding of the existing problem, the real system requirements and the usefulness of the
solution being suggested. Innovative ideas must be developed into an ICT based artefact that
must then be adapted to solve the identified problem. The ICT artefact must be useful from
the viewpoint of the users for whom the solution was developed. This research study presents
the work and findings from user based evaluation of the DIG system for the government
87
sector. The relevant parties, literature and other sources that contributed toward the content of
this research, to the dissertation and personally to the researcher were acknowledged
accordingly throughout the dissertation document. Overall, embarking on this study brought a
challenging, but yet exciting experience for the researcher. The interaction with the various
stakeholders that contributed to the success of this research cannot be described in words.
The experience of interacting with real people, addressing real problems through design
science research was a very rewarding and a fulfilling experience. Although the research
study was conducted through a formal academic process, it provided an opportunity to learn
outside the conventional ICT systems development environment and management
environment through applying innovative research to solve a real world problem. The
insights gathered from this study can support informed arguments related to some of the
theories in the ICT domain. The proposed data integration gateway solution developed in this
study can benefit governments and private businesses and organizations that want to share
data across departments or organizations. The DIG framework therefore is a unique concept
that can be adopted by any sector, but for the government sector the framework can make a
massive difference in service delivery which will benefit citizens and businesses.
88
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